• by Ignacio Ramonet
• Monday, April 11, 2011
• Inter Press Service

The Libyan rebels deserve the help of all democrats. Colonel Gaddafi is indefensible. The international coalition that is attacking him lacks credibility. A democracy is not built with foreign bombs. The contradictions implicit in these four statements give rise to a certain uneasiness about Operation Odyssey Dawn, especially to people on the left, writes Ignacio Ramonet, director of Le Monde diplomatique en espanol

In this analysis, Ramonet writes that a number of observations are in order:

While the recently-liberated peoples of Tunisia and Egypt should have immediately provided support to the besieged Libyans, their governments simply were in no condition to do so. UN Resolution 1973 has the support of the Arab League as well as certain African countries and was proposed by an Arab state: Lebanon. Neither China nor Russia vetoed it. No state, Brazil and India included, voted against it.

One can object to the current structure of the UN or argue that it is dominated by western powers. However, presently the UN is the only source of international law, and unlike the wars of Kosovo and Iraq, which never won UN support, the intervention in Libya is internationally legal and legitimate according to principles of humanitarian solidarity. Muslim countries that were initially resistant, like Turkey, ended up participating. Had Gaddafi made good on his intention to drown the popular uprising in blood, this would have given the green light to the other tyrants in the region to do the same.

The European Union has a particular responsibility in this context, and not only military. It is time to think about the next step in the consolidation of the new democracies across the Mediterranean, and the possibility of programme of massive economic assistance like the 'Marshall Plan' after World War Two.

The Arab peoples are no doubt weighing rights and wrongs in the current intervention. The majority of them support the insurgents and thus far there have been no protests against the operation in Arab capitals. Rather, as if stimulated by it, new protests have sprung up in Morocco, Yemen, Bahrain, and in especially in Syria.

© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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