Experts on Africa who have traveled extensively in Libya contend that the stories emanating from the Western media that portray Libya’s leader, Muammar Gaddafi, as engaging the services of black mercenaries from Sahara and sub-Sahara Africa is a disinformation ploy by the CIA to stoke racist fervor among Libyans rebelling against Gaddafi.
After Western news sources “reported” that Gaddafi had hired black African mercenaries to fight against Libyan rebels, thousand of black African workers in Libya were set upon by angry mobs who believed the Western propaganda that the black workers were fighting for Gaddafi.
The role of President Obama in stoking a CIA-engineered racist response by Libyan rebels has not been lost on a number of African-Americans. One leading African-American activist in Washington, DC wrote in an email: “Not demanding the accountability of a black president will garner us the same things as not holding a white President accountable – nothing.”
Western news organization reported that Libyan rebels were “hunting down” black African mercenaries but many of these were merely workers who came to Libya from their economically-depressed nations to seek employment in mainly the Libyan oil services, agricultural, and construction sectors. Ironically, a number of the Africans targeted by angry mobs spurred on by CIA and other Western intelligence planted news stories are from Kenya, the land that Obama claims as his paternal ancestral home.
Other Africans, stranded in Libya and subjected to the racial onslaught of Libyan Arabs, hailed from South Sudan, Uganda, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Somalia, Ethiopia, Ghana, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Nigeria. A million and a half black African guest workers were in Libya at the outbreak of the fighting between Gaddafi and rebel forces. Only a few of the Africans were evacuated with many being forced to hide in their homes and flee without the support of their governments to squalid refugee camps in Egypt, Tunisia, and Sudan. Even dark-skinned non-African workers from Bangladesh could not escape the wrath of the Libyan rebels.
Other Africans, notably those from Niger, Mali, Gabon, and Chad, recalled how Gaddafi funded development projects in their nations and they responded by travelling to Libya as volunteers to support Gaddafi.
However, these volunteers were branded as mercenaries by the Western media and their intelligence agency overseers. Algeria rejected charges that its nationals were being sent to Libya to fight as mercenaries for Gaddafi.
London’s Sunday Mirror ran a dubious story on March 27 that Gaddafi’s son, Seif al-Islam Gaddafi, had fled to Zimbabwe where he was trying to enlist an African army to assist his father’s forces. The report stated that Zimbabwe’s aging dictator, Robert Mugabe, was prepared to send Zimbabwean army troops to Libya to fight alongside Gaddafi’s army.
The CIA’s propaganda war against black Africans in Libya was not limited to the editorial offices and television news bureaus of Washington, London, Paris, and New York. A Liberian presidential candidate, T. Q. Harris, blamed Gaddafi for the forced conscription of young men and boys into his army. The statement was picked up by Liberia’s longtime CIA-influenced newspapers.
On March 16, The Guardian of the UK printed a clarification of a previous report that intimated that Gaddafi had recruited mercenaries from the Zaghawa tribe living in Darfur and Chad. The Guardian wrote that there was “no evidence that members of the Zaghawa are involved in the present conflict.”
Not only were workers from Chad, Ethiopia, and Somalia hunted down by Libyan rebels and hanged from lamp posts and hacked to death with axes and machetes, but black Libyans, mostly from the southern province of Fezzan, received the same treatment. The neo-conservatives in the Washington and New York media centers ignored the plight of the black workers and continued to echo the charge that any blacks in Libya were Gaddafi mercenaries. The fact that many of the black Africans massacred by the Libyan rebels had Libyan worker documentation was lost on the Western media.
The New York Times, in a March 16 article titled “Libyan Oil Buys Loyal African Allies for Qaddafi,” wrote that Gaddafi recruiters were enlisting “about 200” young men in Mali to fight in Libya. The Times repeated the CIA-engineered disinformation story that 3,000 to 4,000 mercenaries had been recruited by Gaddafi’s government from Mali, Darfur, and Niger at a salary of $1000 per day. However, in a March 11 story in the Times, it was reported that U. S. intelligence officials were unable to confirm the report that between 4,000 and 5,000 mercenaries from Niger, Mali, and Darfur’s Justice and Equality Movement had been hired by Gaddafi for $1000 a day. In an era of information warfare, even he CIA cannot keep its planted news stories straight.
The U. S. ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, in a March 17 statement on the UN Security Council’s adoption of the resolution creating a no-fly zone over Libya stated that one of the reasons was to prevent planes carrying “mercenaries” into Libya to support Gaddafi.
It has also been reported that Saudi Wahabi-linked groups among the rebels, including the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, have specifically targeted and executed Christian black African workers as “infidels” who support Gaddafi.
Adding to the psychological warfare operations that trumpeted the presence of “African mercenaries” among the Gaddafi forces was a “made-in-Israel” report that Gaddafi, with the support of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, and Aman intelligence chief Aviv Kokhavi had arranged, through the Israeli security firm Global CST, the secret transport of 50,000 African mercenaries into Libya. Gaddafi was said to have paid Israel $5 billion to the Israelis for the mercenaries. The report of an Israeli connection to blacks in Libya fueled the anger of radical Islamists among the Libyan rebels who were convinced that Gaddafi not only had a secret deal with Israel but that he was a “crypto Jew” because his grandmother was Jewish. The charge was broadcast on Israeli national television by a Libyan Jewish woman who claimed she was related to Gaddafi. Other Zionist-influenced media sources reported that Gaddafi was relying on Serbian, Ukrainian, and Syrian pilots and a group of fierce Tuareg tribal warriors recruited from across the Saharan Desert.
The Washington Times, a right-wing fringe newspaper owned by self-proclaimed Korean “Messiah” Sun Myung Moon, ran an op-ed on March 21 by Prince Mohamed Hilal al Senussi, a member of the former Libyan royal family Gaddafi ousted in a 1969 coup. Senussi likened the Libyan rebels to members of the Republican “Tea Party” in the United States and he repeated the charge that Qaddafi was using black African mercenaries: “In Baida, over 100 perished in the hands of Gaddafi-employed African mercenaries from Chad, Niger and Mali, prompting local police forces and members of the army to break ranks from the regime to protect their unarmed countrymen. ”
The connivance of Western intelligence agencies, in concert with Israeli elements and Western corporate media, laid the groundwork for the massacre of black Libyans and blacks from other parts of Africa, has enraged African-Americans who previously supported Obama in his political campaigns in Illinois and nationally. Obama, America’s first African-American president, now has the distinction of being the only American president to launch a bloody war on an African nation. In the eyes of many African-American political activists, Obama has revealed himself to be as much a tool of the CIA, Wall Street, the oil companies as past white American presidents.
Source: Strategic Culture Foundation
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