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Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War, Robin Yassin-Kassab, Leila Al-Shami

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Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War, Robin Yassin-Kassab, Leila Al-Shami

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*Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2017*

In 2011, many Syrians took to the streets of Damascus to demand the overthrow of the government of Bashar al-Assad. Today, much of Syria has become a war zone where foreign journalists find it almost impossible to report on life in this devastated land.

Burning Country explores the horrific and complicated reality of life in present-day Syria with unprecedented detail and sophistication, drawing on new first hand testimonies from opposition fighters, exiles lost in an archipelago of refugee camps, and courageous human rights activists among many others. These stories are expertly interwoven with a trenchant analysis of the brutalisation of the conflict and the militarisation of the uprising, of the rise of the Islamists and sectarian warfare, and the role of governments in Syria and elsewhere in exacerbating those violent processes.

With chapters focusing on ISIS and Islamism, regional geopolitics, the new grassroots revolutionary organisations, and the worst refugee crisis since World War Two, Burning Country is a vivid and groundbreaking look at a modern-day political and humanitarian nightmare.

Robin Yassin-Kassab is a regular media commentator on Syria and the Middle East. He is the co-author of Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War (Pluto, 2016, 2018) and author of the novel The Road from Damascus (Penguin, 2009) and contributor to Syria Speaks (Saqi, 2014).

Leila Al-Shami has worked with the human rights movement in Syria and across in the Middle East. She is the co-author of Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War (Pluto, 2016, 2018) and a founding member of Tahrir-ICN, a network that aimed to connect anti-authoritarian struggles across the Middle East, North Africa and Europe.

'The most succinct and convincing insider's narrative of the uprising' - Richard Spencer, Daily Telegraph

'Full of fascinating details' - Robyn Cresswell - The New York Review of Books

'Extraordinary ... the book on Syria I was waiting for' - Molly Crabapple, artist, author, journalist

'Gripping ... Cutting through the fog of geopolitics, Burning Country refocuses the conflict with the people at its centre' - Brian Whitaker, Newsweek

'A detailed history of Syria's moderate opposition and a meticulous analysis of the origins of today's violent dynamics' - New Statesman

'Explores how Syria's peaceful uprising gave way to armed insurgency and sectarian jihad... This is an important, honest and insightful book, well worth anyone's time' - Marc Lynch, Washington Post

'Avoids the easy indulgence of indignation; instead, it elicits the voices of many different Syrians involved in the uprising, acknowledging their suffering as well as their courage, intelligence, and humanity, while explaining the terrible choices that have been forced on them' - Ursula Lindsey, The Nation

'Vital' - Peter Geoghegan - the Herald Scotland

'For decades Syrians have been forbidden from telling their own stories and the story of their country, but here Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila al-Shami tell the Syrian story' - Yassin al-Haj Saleh, Syrian writer, intellectual, and former political prisoner

'By far the best account of the Syrian uprising yet' - Dr. Yasser Munif, Professor of sociology at Emerson College, co-founder of the Global Campaign of Solidarity with the Syrian Revolution

List of Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
Preface
Maps
1. Revolution From Above
2. Bashaar's First Decade
3. Revolution From Below
4. The Grassroots
5. Militarisation and Liberation
6. Scorched Earth: The Rise of the Islamisms
7. Dispossession and Exile
8. Culture Revolutionised
9. The Failure of the Elites
10. The Start of Solidarity
11. Syria Dismantled
Further Reading
Notes
Index

Published by Pluto Press in Feb 2018

Paperback ISBN: 9780745337821
Hardcover ISBN: 9780745337845
eBook ISBN: 9781786802798

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Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2017* In 2011, many Syrians took to the streets of Damascus to demand the overthrow of the government of Bashar al-Assad. Today, much of Syria has become a war zone where foreign journalists find it almost impossible to report on life in this devastated land.

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Indefensible: Democracy, Counterrevolution, and the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism, by Rohini Hensman

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Indefensible: Democracy, Counterrevolution, and the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism, by Rohini Hensman

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A defence of democracy at national and international levels, and critique of attacks on it in the name of "anti-imperialism."

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In 2018, the Syrian government, supported by Russia and Iran, recaptured areas in Eastern Ghouta in Damascus countryside and Daraa governorate. Government forces used a combination of unlawful tactics, including prohibited weapons, indiscriminate strikes, and restrictions on humanitarian aid, to force anti-government groups to surrender in these areas, resulting in mass displacement. Anti-government armed groups indiscriminately attacked neighboring government-held areas and restricted civilians' ability to flee hostilities.

At the time of writing, a tenuous ceasefire was holding in Idlib between the Syrian-Russian military alliance and anti-government armed groups. Anti-government groups in Idlib detained individuals attempting reconciliation with the government, media activists, and restricted humanitarian aid. After several reported chemical attacks during the first half of the year, in an unprecedented step, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) was authorized to attribute responsibility for attacks in Syria.

In areas re-taken from the Islamic State (also known as ISIS), the high toll of the war in civilian casualties and damaged infrastructure became clearer. Landmines planted by ISIS before fleeing continued to kill and maim civilians. Little progress has been made in providing the necessary resources for recovery, and/or compensation for civilian victims of attacks. ISIS and Al-Qaeda affiliates in Syria continued to perpetrate abuses, ranging from summary executions and kidnappings to interference in aid delivery.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a monitoring group based in the UK, estimated the death toll since the start of the war to be as high as 511,000 as of March 2018. Years of relentless fighting left 6.6 million displaced internally and 5.6 million around the world, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

At the end of the year, the Geneva-led political process remained at a standstill, and a new UN special envoy was appointed.

As active conflict partially decreases, Russia and Syria called for refugees to return and Syria passed laws to facilitate reconstruction. Despite this, government forces continued to violate human rights and international humanitarian law, arbitrarily detaining and mistreating people, and imposing onerous restrictions on freedom of movement.

Syrian-Russian Indiscriminate Attacks

Indiscriminate attacks on civilians and civilian objects by the Syrian-Russian military alliance persisted in 2018. In February, government forces launched a military campaign to retake Eastern Ghouta, an urban suburb of Damascus. Over 1,600 civilians were reportedly killed between February 18 until March 21. The Syrian-Russian military alliance struck at least 25 medical facilities, 11 schools, and countless civilian residences.

Similarly, on June 16, the alliance led an offensive in Daraa and Quneitra governorates, southwest of Syria, triggering massive displacement towards Jordan and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

Use of Unlawful Weapons, including Chemical Weapons

Parties to the conflict continued to use unlawful weapons. The Syrian-Russian military alliance used internationally banned cluster munitions and chemical weapons in re-taking areas. Human Rights Watch investigated 36 cluster munition attacks between July 2017 and June 2018 and another two-dozen more possible cluster munition attacks. Evidence suggests the alliance used incendiary weapons in Ghouta and Daraa.

Between 2013 and 2018, Human Rights Watch and seven other independent, international organizations investigated and confirmed at least 85 chemical weapons attacks - the majority perpetrated by Syrian government forces. The actual number of chemical attacks is likely higher.

After a chemical attack on Douma in Eastern Ghouta, there were renewed international efforts to deter use of chemical weapons. Russia used its veto in the Security Council in February and April, preventing the creation of a UN-led investigatory mechanism. However, in June, states parties to the Chemical Weapons Conventions granted the OPCW permanent authorization to investigate and assign responsibility for chemical weapons attacks.

Abuses by Non-State Armed Groups

Between February and April, anti-government groups based in Ghouta - including Jaysh al-Islam, Ahrar al-Sham, and Faylaq al-Rahmane - killed and maimed hundreds of civilians in indiscriminate attacks on Damascus. According to the UN Commission of Inquiry, the armed groups regularly arbitrarily arrested and tortured civilians in Douma, including members of religious minority groups.

Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), an Al-Qaeda affiliate present in Idlib, carried out arbitrary arrests and kidnappings that targeted local political opponents and journalists. Infighting left civilians dead, as did recurring assassinations and car bombings. The group continued to interfere with humanitarian access and aid distribution in areas under its control.

On July 25, ISIS led simultaneous incursions in al-Suweida governorate, killing at least 200 individuals and kidnapping 27 people. ISIS unlawfully executed one of the hostages in August. In November, all the remaining hostages were freed according to the state news agency. In the meantime, the fate of thousands of those kidnapped by ISIS in the east of Syria before they lost the territory remains unknown, with little effort by the Syrian Democratic Forces and US-led coalition to uncover their whereabouts.

Though the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and the US-led coalition pushed ISIS out of Raqqa in October 2017, homemade landmines and explosive devices planted by ISIS before fleeing continued to kill and maim civilians. Between October 2017 and April 2018, more than 1,000 people have been injured or killed by mines, according to local medical workers.

Turkish Offensive on Afrin

On January 20, Turkey launched a military offensive in Afrin district in northwest Syria, previously under the control of the Kurdish-majority Autonomous Administration. As of March, the Turkish offensive reportedly resulted in the deaths of dozens of civilians, and displaced tens of thousands according to the United Nations. Turkish media reported the YPG launched indiscriminate attacks on Turkish border towns and killed at least seven civilians.

Turkish-supported non-state armed groups affiliated with the Free Syrian Army also seized, destroyed, and looted properties of Kurdish civilians in Afrin, while local activists reported at least 86 incidents of abuse that appeared to amount to unlawful arrests, torture, and disappearances by those groups.

Violations by US-Backed Forces and the US-Led Coalition

While the United States-led coalition re-opened investigations into civilian casualties from its strikes and admitted to inadvertently killing civilians, it did not provide transparency around these investigations nor compensation for victims. Although exhumation of mass grave sites began in Raqqa city, little support has been provided to develop clear protocols to preserve or forensically identify the dead.

The US assisted the SDF in northern Syria to detain hundreds of foreign ISIS suspects, and has begun returning suspected fighters to their countries, without transparency, raising human rights concerns.

The Syrian Democratic Council, a civilian authority operating in areas retaken from ISIS, and the Kurdish-majority Autonomous Administration overseeing displacement camps in the northeast, confiscated identification documents of displaced persons and arbitrarily prevented them from leaving the camps and moving freely. In a positive step, in September, the Syrian Democratic Forces pledged to stop recruiting children.

Since January, the Autonomous Administration and the Asayish, the local police, detained at least 20 members of the Kurdish National Council, a coalition of opposition Kurdish parties, and in some cases appear to have forcibly disappeared them.

Arbitrary Detention and Enforced Disappearances

As of August 30, more than 90,000 individuals were forcibly disappeared in Syria, most at the hands of the Syrian government, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR), a local monitoring organization. The Violations Documentation Center (VDC), a local monitoring group, has compiled 60,000 names of those detained by the government since 2011 whose fate remains unknown.

In July, the Syrian government updated civil registries to include death certificates for hundreds of individuals previously detained or disappeared by the government. The updates provided no specific details other than date and, occasionally, cause of death, and the government failed to provide the remains to the families. Meanwhile, the Syrian government continues to detain and mistreat individuals in areas under its control.

Russia, Iran, and Turkey have repeatedly made commitments to resolve arbitrary detention and enforced disappearances as guarantors of the Astana talks. In December 2017, the guarantors established a working group on detentions and abductions in the Syrian conflict. Yet, little progress has been made.

In March, the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria issued a report on sexual and gender-based violence from March 2011 to December 2017 finding that the rape and sexual violence committed by government forces and associated militias amounted to war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Displacement Crisis

From January to April 2018 more than 920,000 individuals had been newly displaced inside of Syria, according to the UN. Neighboring countries - including Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon - continued to prevent Syrians from seeking asylum at their borders, despite serious risks of violence. By September 2018, 5.6 million Syrians have taken refuge outside the country, the majority in neighboring countries.

More than a million Syrian refugees are registered with UNHCR in Lebanon. Lebanon's residency policy makes it difficult for Syrians to maintain legal status. Seventy-four percent of Syrians in Lebanon lack legal residency and risk detention for being in the country unlawfully. In 2017, Lebanese authorities stepped up calls for refugees to return, despite the ongoing conflict and well-founded fears of persecution. A small number of refugees have returned to Syria under localized agreements, however these are not overseen by UNHCR. Some refugees have said they are returning because of harsh policies and deteriorating conditions in Lebanon, not because they think Syria is safe. Municipalities in Lebanon forcibly evicted thousands of refugees in mass expulsions without a legal basis or due process. Tens of thousands remain at risk of eviction.

As of May, Turkey had registered almost 3.6 million Syrian refugees in the country. Since January, however, ten provinces - including Istanbul and Hatay - suspended Syrian asylum seeker registration. Turkish security forces intercepted and deported thousands of newly arrived Syrian asylum seekers at the Turkey-Syrian border during the year, and summarily deported them to the war-ravaged Syrian governorate of Idlib. Turkey has stated that it will not open its border to asylum seekers fleeing hostilities in Idlib. Instead, Turkish authorities have opened several displacement camps in areas under their control in Syria.

As of June 2018, Jordan has registered around 666,294 Syrian refugees. Jordan categorically refused to open the border - closed since June 2016 - to incoming asylum seekers fleeing hostilities in the southwest. However, Jordan helped evacuate members of the Syrian Civil Defense, a humanitarian emergency response team affiliated with the opposition, whom Germany, the United Kingdom and Canada, among others, agreed to resettle. In 2018, Jordan began regularizing the stay of refugees without residency permits.

Russia refused to grant asylum to a Syrian national, claiming that his case was baseless given "the ongoing events on [Syria's] territory have specific characteristics of a counterterrorist operation, not a classical military confrontation."

The US renewed its grant of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to almost 7,000 Syrians living in the United States, but did not extend the status to any new Syrians. It also maintained a ban on Syrian citizens entering the United States. The European Union's response to the Syrian refugee crisis continued to fall short, with its emphasis on preventing arrivals from Turkey and confining those who do in overcrowded, unsanitary camps on Greek islands.

Reconstruction and Property Rights

The Syrian government passed Law 10 of 2018, empowering it to establish redevelopment zones for rehabilitation and reconstruction projects. The law empowers the government to confiscate residents' property without due process or adequate compensation. In November, in response to international pressure, the Syrian parliament amended the law. However, there are still significant concerns in the law that remain unaddressed. In Qaboun and Darayya the government has restricted access for civilian residents seeking to return to their homes, and has unlawfully demolished residents' private homes, without providing notice, alternative housing, or compensation.

Russia has called on the European Union and Western states to support reconstruction in Syria, currently predicted to cost at least US$250 billion. The European Union and the United States have maintained that they will not fund reconstruction in government-held Syria in the absence of a political transition along the lines of the UN Security Council resolution 2254. However, several European states, including France and Switzerland are seeking to support rehabilitation and stabilization efforts in areas re-taken by the government, or have opened humanitarian offices in Damascus.

In areas controlled by anti-government groups and the Syrian Democratic Forces, most Western donors continue to provide humanitarian aid. However, the United Kingdom and Netherlands have withdrawn their support for stabilization and resilience in northwest Syria. The United States also froze its funding for recovery and stabilization in areas captured from ISIS, asking the UAE and Saudi Arabia to step in to support local authorities, which they did.

Key International Actors

The UN-led political negotiations remained at a standstill, while Russia continued its attempts to politically legitimize the government's military gains. In January, Russia hosted a Syrian People's Congress in Sochi to agree on a new constitution. Though it failed to achieve its stated objective, the congress mandated the UN Special Envoy with the creation of a constitutional committee. The committee has not been created yet.

Russia, Turkey, and Iran continued their tripartite meetings on Syria, holding three summit-level meetings in 2018 and three rounds of talks in the Astana process, negotiations on de-escalation held regularly in Astana, Kazakhstan since 2017. Russia remains the primary arms supplier to the Syrian government.

The United States' policies on Syria oscillated. In August, the US announced it would pull back hundreds of millions of dollars in funding allocated to rebuild parts of Syria previously held by ISIS. In September, the US announced that it intended to maintain a military presence in Syria, despite having announced a pullback earlier in the year.

The United States, United Kingdom, and France conducted airstrikes on April 14 in response to the reported chemical weapons attack on Douma. Israel also reportedly conducted several strikes on government-held areas.

In April, EU foreign ministers reiterated their joint commitment to "relentlessly" pursue the release of civilians detained and disappeared, and alongside the UN, co-chaired the Brussels II conference on Syria. It will host a third in March 2019.

In June, Germany's chief federal prosecutor reportedly issued an arrest warrant for a senior Syrian military official on charges of war crimes. France issued its own arrest warrants in November.

UN Security Council and General Assembly

In late 2017, the UN Security Council renewed the mandate for cross-border aid delivery. The humanitarian aspect of the Syrian conflict is one of few where the council maintains consensus. On accountability, the council remains deadlocked due to Russia's use of the veto.

Meanwhile, the International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism (IIIM), a quasi-special prosecutor's office established by the UN General Assembly in December 2016, continued to gather and preserve evidence for future criminal prosecutions. The body is reportedly opening two cases in 2018.

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World Report 2019: Rights Trends in Syria

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In 2018, the Syrian government, supported by Russia and Iran, recaptured areas in Eastern Ghouta in Damascus countryside and Daraa governorate. Government forces used a combination of unlawful tactics, including prohibited weapons, indiscriminate strikes, and restrictions on humanitarian aid, to force anti-government groups to surrender in these areas, resulting in mass displacement.

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Paul Mason on Syria and air strikes, New Statesman, April '18 

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Paul Mason on Syria and air strikes, New Statesman, April '18 

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A left foreign policy and defence strategy for Britain in a disintegrating global order has to start from the principle of defending human rights and observing international law and building capacity for democratic opposition in the countries stirring up conflict. The alternatives to a shower of guided missiles require more than bravado and rhetoric.

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Kilometres matter. If you've been anywhere near war, you will know that one kilometre away is better than 100 metres away. Two kilometres is much better than one. Ten kilometres away and your can smoke a shisha pipe while your shaking hands stroke the stray cats, who also understand the power of distance.

Since the Iraq war, military strategists on all sides have reached for the safety of distance. If Britain joins US-led strikes on the Assad regime in response to the gas attack on Douma, it will probably fire Storm Shadow missiles, which can cruise to a target up to 560km away from the aircraft that releases them.

On the ground in Syria, Russian bases will be protected by S-400 missiles, which can shoot down incoming missiles or aircraft at a range of 400km away, travelling at 5km per second. If this seems to you a long way from the images of retching children, writhing bodies and dead eyes you saw coming out of Douma on Twitter, that is no accident. Human war and machine war are moving along divergent paths.

The purpose of Vladimir Putin's S-400 system is to kill aeroplanes and other missiles. The purpose of dropping a barrel of chlorine on some children in Douma is to terrify other people into submission; to demonstrate your absolute disregard for the rules of war; to send a message to everybody on earth that the multilateral systems designed to prevent war crimes, genocide and torture are defunct.

To defeat Assad, and prevent the further collapse of the global order, long-range missiles are no good. Knowing this, Donald Trump and his national security adviser John Bolton will probably fire a lot of them. No. To defeat Assad you would have to engage in the kind of warfare America did in Iraq, going from house to house in the dark, killing suspected supporters of al-Qaeda, dragging their children and elderly into the dark by flashlight.

You would have to bomb what's left of Syria until it looked like what's left of Gaza. And you would have to do it knowing that into the chaos you create, would move exactly the kind of jihadi groups we are trying to rid the world of.

That's why I am against Britain joining a military strike on Assad's Syria. It's an inadequate and cynical gesture designed for domestic consumption by governments whose own legitimacy is being eroded. The idea that it will save significant numbers of lives is rubbish, and known to be rubbish, by the politicians and retired military people advocating it.

What would, in the short-term, save lives in Eastern Ghouta would be to place massive economic and diplomatic pressure on Russia and Iran, who are the real powers controlling Assad's war in Syria; and to back or re-create a secular-led military opposition on the ground, starting with the Kurds of Rojava. But that is not going to happen.

First, there is no stomach for regime change wars in the West. For the populations of democratic countries, Iraq was not "just another war". Tony Blair and David Miliband seem capable of shrugging it off, their supporters inside Labour endlessly bemused at other people's determination to remember it. But millions of peaceful and humanitarian voters don't want to forget Iraq. They want to make sure they never get fooled again.

Second, because nobody can see an endgame. Iraq was based on the illusion that the US was so powerful that it could shape the world in an unprecedented way; and that "the market" could solve the problems of reconstructing a post-Ba'athist society. In fact America's unipolar power has collapsed, and the market-based governance of Iraq produced chaos.

We are now in an era of "great power" politics played by presidents for life: that is, where major nuclear-armed countries are carving out spheres of influence, creating swathes of territory where international law does not apply, and permanent alliance systems that undermine the relevance of the UN Security Council.

Neither Barack Obama nor Donald Trump had an answer to this problem; nor did they have the honesty to level with the American people that the old answers - the cruise missile and the Arleigh Burke destroyer - had ceased to work. So now a third obstacle to Western intervention has appeared: the manipulation of public opinion by the Kremlin, using all the tools Google, Facebook and Twitter are prepared to hand to it.

Despite the availability of public sources showing it is likely that a regime Mi-8 helicopter dropped a gas container onto a specific building, there are well-meaning people prepared to share the opinion that this was a "false flag", staged by jihadis, to pull the West into the war. The fact that so many people are prepared to clutch at false flag theories is, for Western democracies, a sign of how effective Vladimir Putin's global strategy has been.

For the left, the dangers should be obvious, but too many people are being wilfully blind to them. If Trump strikes a few command bunkers in Syria, and the left goes on the streets shouting "Hands Off Syria" then no matter what those words mean mean for you, for Assad, Putin and Rouhani, they mean hands off the gas bombers and the torturers.

Meanwhile, MPs like James Cleverly, and ministers like Gavin Williamson and Sajid Javid, have already drafted their speeches labelling those who oppose the missile strikes on Assad as fascists, traitors and dupes. So we must make especially clear that our opposition to military action in this case is about defending law and proportionality, not crank theories spread by the Kremlin.

A left foreign policy and defence strategy for Britain in a disintegrating global order has to start from the principle of defending human rights and observing international law and building capacity for democratic opposition in the countries stirring up conflict. The alternatives to a shower of guided missiles require more than bravado and rhetoric.

To bring the perpetrators of the war crime in Douma to justice means unblocking the multilateral system at the UN and the International Criminal Court. That in turn means persuading the Russian people to elect a government that does not sanction torture, chemical weapons attack, the assassination of opponents and the conquest of territory by brute force.

The first condition of achieving that is to stop doing these things ourselves: stop backing Saudi Arabia in Yemen; stop backing Israel as its snipers shoot down unarmed civilians in Gaza.

The second condition is that we are prepared to hit Putin where it will really hurt: arrest and deport his main associates in every Western country; seize their property; make it an offence for law, accountancy and financial management firms to work for Russian entities. And shut off the international SWIFT payments system to Russia.

Yes, that means enforcing economic autarky on Russia and its allies, and collapsing its banks. But if you actually want to change their behaviour, that's what you would need to do.

The third condition is that, within the bounds set by our rule of law, we wage a political fight against Putin and his United Russia Party: we support the Russian NGOs, political parties and cultural groups prepared to resist mafia rule; we extend BBC and other Western media's foreign language services not just to Russia and Ukraine but to Greece, Turkey, Hungary and the Balkans. We build capacity for democratic institutions across the whole of Eurasia.

These three things: tough economic sanctions, a culture war against kleptocratic elites and the end of support for rival kleptocrats would not, on their own, lead to immediate peace and harmony. They would, for a time, leave the world divided into sealed economic trading blocs, as in the 1930s

But if you want to throw words around like fascism and appeasement, you must also be prepared to contemplate doing what democracies in the 1930s did when they decided to stop appeasing fascism. Why won't the western elites do this? First, because they are thoroughly penetrated by Russian money and allegiances to pro-Kremlin oligarchs. That's where playing tennis with a Putin-crony for £160,000 gets you as foreign secretary.

Next, because they prefer to play at war with standoff weapons: machines vs machines, radars vs jammers - for the age-old reason that lucrative jobs in the companies that make these weapons await them once they retire from politics.

Finally, because the institutions the West has created, supposedly to insure against being held hostage by dictators and uphold international law, are not strong enough. The European Union is paralysed by fear of far-right political forces that Putin himself has stirred up.

As with Mordor, no detail escapes the unseeing eye: Sweden buys an anti-aircraft missile from the US instead of one made in France? The pro-Putin far-right party, the Sweden Democrats are on the case, calling for a cheaper option, while Sputnik, the pro-Moscow news agency, reports their every word.

NATO is also a strategically weakened entity. The idea that the Greeks will lift a finger to help Estonia, whose political leaders crowed as the European Central Bank and the Commission trampled on Greek democracy in 2015? Forget it. As for Germany, with all sides of mainstream politics opposed to higher military spending, and some politicians overtly sympathetic to Russian diplomatic aims, it is not likely to deliver on any request to invoke Article 5.

As I'm writing this, the Russian ambassador to Lebanon has warned that, if the US attacks Syria, Russia will use its long-range missiles to shoot down not only the incoming missiles but to attack the planes and ships that fire them. Trump has tweeted in response: "Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and "smart!" You shouldn't be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!"

This is a man currently under investigation for collusion with Russia. Does going to war alongside forces he is commander in chief of not make even the armchair missile commanders of the Tory party and the Labour right even slightly uneasy?

Trump is a man who has fantasised for his entire adult life about using nuclear weapons, and is insouciant about the loss of civilian life, even in his own country, let alone abroad.

How could we in the West have stopped last week's atrocity in Douma? By not looting Russia in the 1990s; by listening to Putin when he warned he was going to dismantle the global order and reacting with seriousness instead of scorn.

We should have strengthened the defences of democratic countries against the hybrid warfare he is waging. We should have supported the secular resistance in Syria, not the jihadis who came to prominence because we allowed barbaric regimes like Saudi Arabia to call the shots on who got weapons and who did not.

The closer you've been to war, the more you ask yourself whether there are things you can do to stop it happening, even when there is justification for it. But that's not how Theresa May is thinking. For May, the missile strikes on Assad will be yet another useful weapon to attack Labour with.

First Corbyn was slandered as a Czech spy, then a Putin stooge - for asking what turned out to be a laser-accurate question about the origin of the substance that poisoned the Skripals. Then he was smeared as an anti-Semite. Now he, and those of us who support him in resisting the unilateral strikes on Syria, will be labelled as Assad stooges on top of that.

Under May, the Tory party has become filthier than at any time since the early Thatcher years. Shacked up with the sectarian DUP in Ireland, sending messages of support to the anti-Semitic Fidesz party in Hungary, discussing how to "spin" the Grenfell fire in a meeting just yards from where it happened. Lacking any other principle, the principle they have adopted is to delegitimise the Labour Party as a democratic opposition.

If the US strikes Assad, the House of Commons should vote against participation, and should refuse to sanction any action taken retrospectively. Labour and the other opposition parties should go on asking for evidence, due process and action under international law, both on Douma and on the Skripal case. Though weakened, the multilateral institutions of the world are not dead, so we should go on trying to use them to bring the Skripal's attempted killers and the people who dropped gas on Douma to justice.

But strategically what's going to end the regimes of Putin, Assad and Rouhani is the one event the west won't countenance: their political overthrow by secular, democratic and pro-social justice movements. That's my weapon of choice against the perpetrators of the Douma attack.

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Futile air strikes on Syria won't defeat Assad and Putin

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Kilometres matter. If you've been anywhere near war, you will know that one kilometre away is better than 100 metres away. Two kilometres is much better than one. Ten kilometres away and your can smoke a shisha pipe while your shaking hands stroke the stray cats, who also understand the power of distance.

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Peter Tatchell on The Stop the War Coalition, Dec. '16

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Peter Tatchell on The Stop the War Coalition, Dec. '16

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'The Stop the War coalition is betraying Syrians by failing to actively campaign against the war crimes of Assad and Putin. '

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The Stop the War Coalition (STWC) is in moral meltdown and in the throes of a rebellion by many of its longtime supporters - including me - over its one-sided Syria protests and its persistent failure to listen to appeals from democratic, anti-war and civil society activists inside Syria. The air strikes by presidents Assad and Putin on apartments, markets, hospitals, schools, mosques, civil rescue teams and aid convoys are war crimes that echo Guernica, Dresden and Cambodia. So where are the protest marches by Britain's leading anti-war organisation?

Ridiculed by some as the "stop the Western war coalition", disenchantment with the organisation has become widespread since the summer and is spreading to longtime, loyal supporters who were once its bedrock. Last month Muslim activists privately pressed its leaders to more strongly and publicly condemn Assad and Putin's war crimes - to no avail. They were palmed off with the usual excuses: that condemning the UK and US is the anti-war movement's first duty and top priority. As if it can't protest both!

The coalition won't even campaign for airdrops of food and medical supplies to besieged civilians. It seems they'd rather see hungry, sick families die than taint themselves with the "imperialist collaboration" of supporting Western humanitarian aid. In a breathtaking display of double standards, they supported aid convoys to refugees in Calais but not to those in Aleppo. No wonder the movement is increasingly discredited.

Stop the War Coalition's annual conference in October was heckled by protesters who condemned the organisation - and its keynote speaker, Jeremy Corbyn - for not mobilising against the indiscriminate bombing of Aleppo, and other war crimes, by Syria's president Assad and his Russian allies. Just before the conference, an open letter to Corbyn, signed by Labour party and Momentum activists, criticised his failure to condemn these war crimes and to push for humanitarian aid to the besieged civilian populations.

Symptomatic of the rot at the heart of Stop the War Coalition is former chair Andrew Murray's article published in the Morning Star in October. A leading official in the anti-war movement, Murray blasted the West but didn't even mention Russia's mass killing of women and children in Syria.

The coalition is, or was, one of the great "people power", progressive social movements of the past half-century. It mobilised millions against the Iraq war. I was a supporter from the outset. I salute much of what the coalition has done and achieved since its formation in 2001. It has been right on foreign and military policy more times than successive British governments. But on Syria the movement has lost its way, big-time.

It pains me to say this: Stop the War Coalition has betrayed the Syrian people who protested peacefully for democracy in 2011 and have been massacred by Assad ever since. The principles of internationalist solidarity have been dumped. Responding to critics it its own ranks, the coalition belatedly, and somewhat mutedly, condemned the Assad and Putin bombing of civilians but has never organised a march against them. Indeed, although quick to demonstrate in opposition to any and all Western interventions, the coaltion has failed to even once rally against the military intervention in Syria by Russia, Iran and Hezbollah.

Chris Nineham, STWC vice-chair, rejected calls to organise protests against Russia, saying his organisation's focus "is on what our Government is doing" and that protesting Russia "wouldn't make a blind bit of difference as to what Putin does." The organisation never offered that reasoning when alerted to US war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo. It rightly protested loud and clear.

The Syrian war has, so far, resulted in hundreds of thousands of people being killed and more than 11 million people being displaced, wounded, or tortured - most of them civilians. A staggering 11.5 per cent of the entire population have suffered injury or death. In what could be seen as a bid to deflect criticism from the Assad tyranny, STWC has portrayed Isis as the main threat to Syrians. This is nonsense.

According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR), Assad's forces were responsible for 96 per cent of the more than 180,000 civilian deaths, including more than 18,000 children, between March 2011 and November 2015. Isis certainly is murderous but it accounted for only 3 per cent of civilian fatalities, with 3 per cent of civilian deaths due to other military forces, including rebels and the US-led coalition. You'd never know this from reading the blogs on the STWC website.

An updated report last month by the SNHR documented that the civilian death toll since 2011 has now risen to 202,973, and that 188,729 of these fatalities can be attributed to Assad's forces. This exposé was dismissed by many coalition supporters as "Western propaganda." Some smeared the SNHR as "CIA stooges" and "agents of imperialism." The SNHR report also revealed that 86 per cent of the 23,863 children killed, and 88 per cent of the 22,823 women killed in the conflict, were murdered by the regime, which was also responsible for 99 per cent of the 12,836 deaths under torture.

In a survey of Syrian refugees in Germany, conducted by Syrian NGOs under the supervision of the Berlin Social Science Centre, 70 per cent said they fled Syria to escape Assad, not Isis. But the coalition prefers to shout against Isis.

The Russians, who ostensibly came to Syria to fight Isis have, in fact, massacred more civilians than the Isis terrorists. They are in Syria as an army of occupation, propping up a fascist regime; echoing the way the US intervened in Vietnam to sustain the Saigon tyranny. Russia is the new imperialist thug on the block, but the anti-imperialists of STWC look the other way and do nothing.

Echoing the "we know best" neo-colonial smugness of the Western establishment, STWC has refused requests to have Syrian democrats and left-wingers opposed to Assad speak at its Syria events; but it has offered a platform to Syrians Issa Chaer and Mother Agnes, who have respectively defended the Damascus regime and claimed that allegations of chemical attacks by Assad's forces are fabricated. This perceived policy of exclusion was highlighted at the November 2015 STWC public meeting on Syria in the House of Commons, chaired by Diane Abbott. No Syrians were allowed on the speaker's panel - at a meeting about Syria!

Some anti-war and anti-Assad Syrian democrats went to the meeting anyway, but were not invited to speak. When they eventually shouted out in frustration, they were jeered, and smeared by some as warmongers - falsely accused of wanting the West to bomb and invade. STWC stewards tried to eject them.

One of the invited speakers at that meeting was Tory MP Crispin Blunt. Although he said he opposed military intervention, he stressed that air strikes and troops on the ground would be necessary in the end to defeat Isis. In other words, he was ultimately pro-war and he later did vote for the UK bombing campaign. Despite favouring military intervention, he was given a Stop the War Coalition speaking slot but anti-war Syrian democrats were not.

When it came to questions from the floor, Green MP Caroline Lucas urged that the Syrians be allowed to speak. Her request was ignored. She later cited this suppression of Syrian voices as one of the reasons she ended her official role in the coalition. Near the end of the meeting, I personally appealed to Diane Abbott to let the Syrians have their say but she refused and closed the meeting early rather than allow the Syrians to be heard. Even if the coalition believed the Syrians were wrong, as a fundamental principle of democratic open debate, they should have been given a chance to speak.

BBC2's Daily Politics show later highlighted this silencing of Syrian voices by the coalition. Syrian democrats complain that the coalition always protests against Western intervention but has failed to support demonstrations against the Russian, Iranian and Hezbollah military interference in Syria, which has escalated the conflict and led to the rising civilian death toll.

In its defence, the coalition says its main purpose and effectiveness is to challenge UK Government war policies; to hold our own Government to account. I agree. But surely this does not preclude also protesting war crimes and tyranny by other parties to the Syria conflict. Can't they do both? Such consistency would give the anti-war movement greater authority and credibility - making it more impactful and effective.

What's more, despite its claims to only back protests against the UK Government and not against the policies of other governments, the coalition has commendably supported demonstrations against the Saudi bombing campaign in Yemen, against President Sisi's dictatorship in Egypt and against the Israeli attack on Gaza. It has also championed laudable causes completely unrelated to its anti-war remit, including the "Refugees Are Welcome" demonstration in March and the anti-austerity protests at October's Tory party conference.

Just last week STWC published a stinging critique of Louise Casey's report on integration and cohesion in Britain. It seems they've got an opinion on everything, but are unwilling to campaign against Assad and Putin's barbarities in Syria, which constitute some of the biggest war crimes since the US carpet-bombed Cambodia in the 1970s.

So why, exactly, is the coalition willing to rally against so many diverse injustices but not against those by the Syrian and Russian regimes? It has led many critics, including some on the left, to accuse them of collusion and being apologists. Perhaps these inconsistencies are one reason for the movement's dwindling public support. The December 2015 "Stop Bombing Syria" national demonstration in London drew less than 5,000 people. This is much smaller than STWC protests a few years ago, which often ran from 20,000 to 100,000 people.

There were also significantly fewer Muslims present, prompting one coalition insider to confide to International Business Times that many Muslims were feeling alienated by an organisation that is perceived to mostly turn a blind eye to the Assad dictatorship and that has failed to actively campaign against the mass slaughter of Muslim civilians by his regime.

As well as systematically ignoring war crimes committed by Assad's forces, STWC supporters have, to my face, misrepresented and dismissed the Syrian civil society opposition to Assad as jihadi extremists and imperialist cheerleaders.

They imply there are no democrats and left-wingers in Syria; erroneously depicting the conflict as being solely between Assad, US-backed Islamist rebels, Isis and other fanatics. This invisibilises and marginalises the non-violent, secular, democratic, local community and non-aligned opposition to Assad's tyranny. These progressive oppositionists include the Local Coordination Committees, Planet Syria, the White Helmets and many other civic organisations based inside Syria who daily risk their liberty and life in defence of democratic and humanitarian ideals. They oppose both Assad and Isis but get no support or solidarity from the coalition.

Another tactic favoured by defenders of STWC is to defame groups like Syria Solidarity UK as US stooges, militarists and neo-cons - even though many of their members are anti-war, left-wing and anti-imperialist.

In the run-up to the parliamentary vote on air strikes in Syria last December, I wrote an article setting out why I opposed the push for war and David Cameron's proposals to bomb Isis. I argued that far from stopping Isis attacks on the UK, as Cameron claimed, air strikes could provoke retaliation, making such attacks more likely. They also risked radicalising a new generation of Muslims in Britain and Syria, pushing them into the arms of Islamist extremists.

This did not stop STWC activists from later denouncing me face-to-face as a "warmonger, "bomber Tatchell" and "the mouthpiece of America."

To substantiate this accusation, they misrepresented my call, which echoed that of democratic Syrian civil society organisations, for the UN General Assembly to use resolution 377A (Uniting for Peace) to override the Security Council to mandate no-bombing zones, civilian safe havens and humanitarian aid corridors.

They claimed these proposals would require bombing and this would make matters worse for civilians. In fact, this call is a bid to stop Assad and Putin's bombing, which would save many lives.

STWC is rightly concerned about the civilian casualties that would ensue, and are ensuing, from Western bombing missions. I share that concern and oppose those missions. But the number of civilians killed by US-led coalition air strikes (at least 459 in 2014-15, according to the Airwars project), is dwarfed by the total of more than 200,000 civilians killed since 2011 - the vast majority by the Assad regime.

Losing all perspective and proportionality, STWC organises demos against the US-led coalition forces responsible for the death of hundreds of people but not against Assad who has killed nearly 200,000. Nor does it rally against the Russian bombing campaign, with its indiscriminate use of illegal cluster and phosphorous bombs.

In the year to September 2016, Russian air strikes killed 3,264 civilians, including 911 children and 619 women - many times more than the number killed in the same period by the US-led coalition, which STWC ceaselessly protests against. Aren't its protests somewhat one-sided and disproportionate?

For more than three years, and particularly during the Vienna peace talks in 2015, Syrian civil society organisations appealed to the US, Russia and the UN to agree to no-bombing zones to save civilian lives by marking out populated areas where air strikes would be forbidden.

STWC repeatedly rejected this appeal, arguing that enforcement of a no-bombing zone would result in civilian deaths. Yes. It might. But innocents are already dying in their thousands. Even Nato's months of aerial attacks in Libya, which went beyond a no-bombing zone and are not a model to emulate, resulted only 72 confirmed civilian fatalities, according to Human Rights Watch (though the real figure was probably higher).

What is worse: no-bombing zones that could result in a couple of hundred non-combatants dying or the continuation of the current Assad and Putin attacks that have resulted in scores of thousands of civilian casualties? If no-bombing zones had been enforced three years ago, they would have by now saved many times more lives than may have been lost in their enforcement.

Writing in The Guardian, Lindsey German, convenor of Stop the War Coalition, remained adamant: "The answer to the misery of the people of Aleppo... is not a no-fly [no bombing] zone, which in fact entails military intervention... All that this will bring to the people of Aleppo is more suffering."

But this is not the view of Syrian civil society organisations, whose appeals STWC continues to arrogantly disregard. By not supporting no-bombing zones, this coalition is, by default, giving Assad and Putin a free hand to continue bombing civilian areas - a bizarre and, some would say, shameful stance for a supposedly anti-war organisation.
Stop the War Coalition failed to respond to multiple requests for an interview and/or comments in response to the accusations in this article. For more info about Peter Tatchell's human rights campaigns, to receive his email bulletins or to make a donation: Peter@PeterTatchellFoundation.org We'll tell you what's true.
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Stop the War is more interested in fighting the West than for Syrians

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The Stop the War Coalition (STWC) is in moral meltdown and in the throes of a rebellion by many of its longtime supporters - including me - over its one-sided Syria protests and its persistent failure to listen to appeals from democratic, anti-war and civil society activists inside Syria.

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The ‘anti-imperialism’ of idiots, Leila Al Shami, April '18

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The ‘anti-imperialism’ of idiots, Leila Al Shami, April '18

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How the Stop the War Coalition ignored Assad's atrocities to peddle Putin's line on Syria, Sam Hamad, International Business Times, Oct. '16

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How the Stop the War Coalition ignored Assad's atrocities to peddle Putin's line on Syria, Sam Hamad, International Business Times, Oct. '16

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In a debate in Parliament, the British foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, recently asked why the UK's only 'anti-war' organisation the 'Stop the War Coalition' (SWC) hadn't condemned Russia and the Assad regime's attempted annihilation of Aleppo. Johnson further asked why the SWC hadn't organised a demonstration outside the Russian embassy.

The fact that it takes Boris Johnson to ask these questions of a supposedly 'left-wing' anti-war group is itself telling. The SWC was set up by a host of different 'leftist' anti-war forces to oppose British involvement in the Iraq war. In this capacity, the group was successful in terms of serving as a mere banner for millions of people who opposed the war in the UK, but it was never supposed to be a mere politically neutral banner.

The group was controlled at the leadership level by a host of far-left and left-wing forces and personalities, ranging from the Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party and the Stalinist Communist Party of Britain to Labour left types such as George Galloway, Tony Benn and, of course, current Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

The SWC always carried with it a particular view of the world, one born of traditional left politics but mostly associated with Stalinism. This worldview is often referred to as 'campism', which essentially means that these political forces sided with the Soviet Union, which was seen in differing degrees as the camp of 'world socialism' or merely as a counterpoint to the camp of the always greater evil of US and 'capitalist' imperialism. In practice, this simply meant that these forces supported the totalitarian monstrosity that USSR and apologised for its crimes - depicting all of its enemies as stooges of Western imperialism.

In the post-Soviet era, the SWC retains its Manichaean opposition to so-called US imperialism, while it attaches itself to any particular force that it sees as being opposed to US imperialism, no matter the crimes and the ideology of the force in question - this means Assad's Syria, Putin's Russia and the Iranian regime.

Take, for example, SWC spokesman Chris Nineham's interview on BBC radio following Johnson's calling out of the group over its silence over Aleppo. Nineham is a member of a cult-like SWP splinter group called Counterfire whose leaders are also the leaders of the SWC, and a leading member of which serves as an aid to Corbyn's leadership. In the interview, Nineham claimed that the SWC condemned not just Russia but all foreign interventions into what is now a disastrous... situation for the Syrian people... but we were set up as a coalition as a response to 9/11 and in response to the Western, British drive to war back in 2001 and that is our focus'.

The SWC has, at every step, sought to demonise the rebels and portray the Assad regime and its allies in a favourable light.

This gets to the heart of the SWC's worldview. If your focus is only on 'Western intervention', as Nineham says it is, then when there's a situation where 'Western intervention' is not the main evil, you're essentially washing your hands of the whole affair.

But combined with this deeply conservative, selective and isolationist worldview is the SWC's active hostility to the Syrian revolution. In fact, it's of some irony that it was Boris Johnson who took the SWC to task for its lack of care regarding Russia's attempted annihilation of Free Aleppo. Just in December of last year, Boris Johnson was himself arguing that Britain ought to 'deal with the devil' and 'work with Putin and Assad in Syria', but you'd expect that of a right-wing realist conservative, while in March this year he had a column in the Telegraph with the headline 'Bravo for Assad'.

Far from Ninheham's claim that the group 'condemns' Russia intervention in Syria, I'm surprised that the SWC didn't republish Johnson's articles or invite him to speak at their conferences, given that Johnson's previous call for the UK to work with Putin and Assad has been popular among the SWC ranks. It has been echoed by its leading figures, such as SWC vice-chairman George Galloway on his show for Russian propaganda service RT, as well as founding member and patron of the SWC Tariq Ali, who, during a rally for the group in November 2015, argued that the UK 'should be fighting side by side with Assad and the Russians'.

The SWC has, at every step, sought to demonise the rebels and portray the Assad regime and its allies in a favourable light. Following Assad's gassing to death of over a thousand Syrians at Ghouta, the SWC, a supposedly objective anti-war group, immediately published an article denying Assad's responsibility.

Along with this, it rallied to the defence of Assad by holding 'Hands off Syria' demos due to the remote threat of the US and UK carrying out strikes against Assad's war machine. Unsurprisingly, not one Syrian was on the platform and, in the same week as we saw Syrian children convulsing to death on hospital tables due to Assad's sarin attacks, the SWC saw fit to use Ba'athist flags to publicise their demos.

Following on from this, the SWC decided to invite the pro-Assad nun and firm supporter of Assad's war effort Mother Agnes to its annual conference, with no pro-revolution Syrians on the platform to counter her poison. Thankfully, after a campaign by pro-revolutionary Syrians and others, the SWC reluctantly dropped Mother Agnes. However, most interestingly, 'national chair' of the organisation during this time was one Jeremy Corbyn.

Russia is committing genocide in Syria, pulverising Aleppo and deliberately targeting hospitals and civilian areas.

And this is the most disturbing element of the SWC and its counter-revolutionary, pro-fascist politics - they are now essentially reflected at the highest levels of the Labour Party. The current leader of the party, Jeremy Corbyn, is a founding member of the SWC and continues to speak at their conferences.

One must never think that Corbyn has somehow forsaken their politics - on the contrary, as we've seen since he's been leader of Her Majesty's Opposition, he's elevated these monstrous politics to new heights and, most dangerously, allowed them to have concrete influence on people's lives.

The Russian government reacted to Johnson's call for protests outside the Russian embassy by accusing him of 'Russophobia' - this is a very old tactic used by Russia to deflect from its crimes. But Corbyn and the SWC followed suit. Corbyn issued a statement following Johnson's comments calling for protests outside the US embassy and claiming that the 'focus' on Russia's crimes was a 'deflection'. One ought to really let the meaning of his statement sink in.

Russia is committing genocide in Syria, pulverising Aleppo and deliberately targeting hospitals and civilian areas. Its ambition is to destroy the Syrian rebels and cleanse liberated civilian areas, murdering as many Syrians as it must in the process. Those who want to protest and take action against this are, according to Corbyn, a 'deflection'. In his worldview, the real crime is the much lesser deaths caused by US intervention against Isis - the Russian-led genocidal counter-revolution, the hundreds of thousands murdered, the millions ethnically cleansed, and the millions facing brutal sieges, do not exist in Corbyn's mind.

Added to this, you had Corbyn's key ally and Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry on Channel 4 News using Assad's ethnic cleansing of Homs as a potential model for Aleppo. She also acquiesced to the raison d'etre of Assad and Russia's collective punishment by repeating the fascistic lies that the problem is not Russia, Iran and Assad attempting to annihilate the liberated areas of the city, but rather '900 jihadis in Eastern Aleppo'.

The British government at least rhetorically condemns the Russian-led genocide in Syria, while the allegedly 'left-wing' opposition seeks to justify it and dismiss those who stand against it. Either way, no one will help the people of Aleppo or Free Syrians in general.

The politics of the SWC is triumphant.
Sam Hamad is a Scottish-Egyptian writer based in Edinburgh. He specialises in Middle Eastern affairs.

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How the Stop the War Coalition ignored Assad's atrocities to peddle Putin's line on Syria

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In a debate in Parliament, the British foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, recently asked why the UK's only 'anti-war' organisation the 'Stop the War Coalition' (SWC) hadn't condemned Russia and the Assad regime's attempted annihilation of Aleppo. Johnson further asked why the SWC hadn't organised a demonstration outside the Russian embassy.

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Syria war: The online activists pushing conspiracy theories, BBC, April '18

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Syria war: The online activists pushing conspiracy theories, BBC, April '18

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As the investigation continues into another alleged chemical attack in Syria, one group of influential online activists is busy spreading their version of events.

Inspectors from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) are attempting to access the previously rebel-held town of Douma, where medical organisations and rescue workers say President Bashar al-Assad's forces dropped bombs filled with toxic chemicals in an attack on 7 April, killing more than 40 people.

The Syrian government and its key ally, Russia, say the incident was staged. But the US, UK and France - who support the opposition to Mr Assad - say they are confident that chlorine and possibly a nerve agent were used.

Despite the uncertainty about what happened in Douma, a cluster of influential social media activists is certain that it knows what occurred on 7 April.

They've seized on a theory being floated by Russian officials and state-owned media outlets that the attacks were "staged" or were a "false flag" operation, carried out by jihadist groups or spies in order to put the blame on the Assad government and provide a justification for Western intervention.

The group includes activists and people who call themselves "independent journalists", and several have Twitter followings reaching into the tens or hundreds of thousands.
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The activists call themselves "anti-war", but as they generally back the Syrian government's military operations against rebel forces seeking to overthrow Mr Assad and Russian air strikes carried out in support, it might be more accurate to describe them as "anti-Western intervention" or "pro-Syrian government".

According to their narrative, international media organisations across the political spectrum, along with human rights organisations, are somehow covertly aligned with Western governments, Saudi Arabia, the Islamic State group and al-Qaeda and taking part in a secretive plot to take over Syria.

The network of activists includes people like Vanessa Beeley. She has more than 30,000 Twitter followers and writes for a news outlet that the website Media Bias/Fact Check calls a "conspiracy and conjecture site" that has "an extreme right bias".

In response to a list of questions, she called BBC Trending's story a "blatant attempt" to "silence independent journalism" and repeated unsubstantiated claims about alleged chemical weapons attacks.

Influential accounts

Beeley gives talks to fringe groups and makes appearances on media outlets including state-owned Russian channel RT.

But in the online conversation about Syria there are more influential activists, about whom much less is known.

Sarah Abdallah (@sahouraxo on Twitter) has more than 125,000 followers, among them more than 250 journalists from mainstream media outlets. Her follower count is comparable to BBC journalists who regularly report on Syria, such as BBC Middle East Editor Jeremy Bowen (167,000) and BBC Chief International Correspondent Lyse Doucet (142,000).
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In addition to pictures of herself, Sarah Abdallah tweets constant pro-Russia and pro-Assad messages, with a dollop of retweeting mostly aimed at attacking Barack Obama, other US Democrats and Saudi Arabia.

In her Twitter profile she describes herself as an "Independent Lebanese geopolitical commentator" but she has almost no online presence or published stories or writing away from social media platforms. A personal blog linked to by her account has no posts.

Her tweets have been quoted by mainstream news outlets, but a Google News search indicates that she has not written any articles in either English or Arabic.

She refused to comment several times when approached by BBC Trending and did not respond to specific requests to comment on this story in particular.

White Helmets

The Sarah Abdallah account is, according to a recent study by the online research firm Graphika, one of the most influential social media accounts in the online conversation about Syria, and specifically in pushing misinformation about a 2017 chemical weapons attack and the Syria Civil Defence, whose rescue workers are widely known as the "White Helmets".

The White Helmets operate in rebel-held areas. They have been one of the sources that Western media outlets, including the BBC, have quoted about alleged chemical attacks in Syria. With regard to the incident in Douma, the BBC has not been able independently to verify the group's reports.

Graphika chief executive John Kelly says his company's analysis showed distinct patterns emerging.

"When you're looking at these disinformation campaigns, a lot of the same characters show up for every party," he told BBC Trending.

Graphika was commissioned to prepare a report on online chatter by The Syria Campaign, a UK-based advocacy group organisation which campaigns for a democratic future for Syria and supports the White Helmets. The White Helmets have been the subject of two Oscar-nominated documentary films and have been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Graphika found 20 million messages about the White Helmets, split between tweets in support and in opposition. Among the opponents, Kelly says, Sarah Abdallah was "by far the most influential", followed by Vanessa Beeley.

The firm found that Sarah Abdallah's account was primarily followed by a number of different interest clusters: supporters of pro-Palestinian causes, Russians and Russian allies, white nationalists and those from the extremist alt-right, conservative American Trump supporters, far-right groups in Europe and conspiracy theorists.

These groups were instrumental in making the hashtag #SyriaHoax trend after the chemical weapons attack in the rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhoun in April 2017.

That hashtag, pushed by Sarah Abdallah and influential American conservative activists, became a worldwide trend on Twitter. Many of those tweeting it claimed that the chemical weapons attack was faked or a hoax.

Beeley said the 2017 attack had "been debunked by a number of highly respected analysts and experts." She alleged that evidence "points to the White Helmets as a propaganda construct" and asked, via email: "Why has the BBC never carried out an investigation into the White Helmets?"

Experts from a joint UN-OPCW mission said in October 2017 that they were confident a Syrian Air Force jet dropped munitions containing sarin on Khan Sheikhoun, dismissing statements from Russia that the jet had fired conventional munitions at a rebel chemical weapons depot.

Drowned out

The difficulty in reporting on the ground in Syria has opened up an information vacuum which has been partially filled by highly partisan sources, according to Scott Lucas, a professor of international politics at the University of Birmingham and editor of news and analysis site EA Worldview,

"None of it is journalism; none of it is really based on solid independent reporting," Lucas says.

"It is absolutely right to question all narratives, including official narratives of what is happening," he says. "The key is that you don't actually start with a narrative, you start with the facts and you establish what may not be true and what may even be disinformation.

"The danger we face is, unreliable information is now being taken up by more established - and what we would think of as - more reliable outlets," he says.
Syria 'chemical attack': What we know
And although the activists' follower accounts continue to grow, there is one indication that their influence online might be on the decline compared with last year.

In the hours after the alleged attack in Douma, "Syria" was a top trending term on Twitter, but the messages by pro-Assad activists were drowned out by reports from a range of news outlets.

The hashtag #SyriaHoax was used around 17,000 times in a week (compared to more than 280,000 times in April 2017), and mostly failed to make Twitter's lists of top trends.

Do you have a story for us? Email BBC Trending .
More from Trending: While opinion polls show a comfortable lead for the pro-choice side in an upcoming referendum on abortion in Ireland, one set of figures indicates pro-life paid adverts are gaining more traction on Facebook. But why? You can follow BBC Trending on Twitter @BBCtrending, and find us on Facebook. All our stories are at bbc.com/trending. READ NOW Why are polls and Facebook ads at odds in Ireland?

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The online activists pushing Syria conspiracy theories

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As the investigation continues into another alleged chemical attack in Syria, one group of influential online activists is busy spreading their version of events. Inspectors from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) are attempting to access the previously rebel-held town of Douma, where medical organisations and rescue workers say President Bashar al-Assad's forces dropped bombs filled with toxic chemicals in an attack on 7 April, killing more than 40 people.

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Brian Whitaker on Vanessa Beeley, April '18

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Brian Whitaker on Vanessa Beeley, April '18

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One spin-off from the Syrian conflict has been a war of words that reaches far beyond the Middle East. It's a battle in which honest reporting and the search for truth have come under sustained attack.

Those leading the attack claim they are simply asking questions that need to be asked. It's healthy scepticism, they say. But it's a selective kind of scepticism where reports from some sources, primarily mainstream media in the west, are dismissed as untrue - not because evidence shows they are wrong but because they don't fit the desired narrative.

At the same time, reports that do fit the narrative win praise on social media, regardless of supporting evidence, and people who venture to question them are liable to be assailed with abuse.

A prominent example is the work of Vanessa Beeley, a supporter of the Assad regime whose reports from Syria have turned her into a social media celebrity. The Russian propaganda channel, RT, describes her as "an independent investigative journalist" and, in addition to her Russian TV appearances, she is associate editor of 21st Century Wire, the conspiracy theory website that publishes most of her work.

To her admirers on social media Beeley is almost a goddess and criticising her work is little short of blasphemy. She's on the ground " putting the truth out there", they say. She's a brilliant reporter and a " real journalist". She deserves a Pulitzer and possibly a Nobel Peace Prize too. Those singing her praises range from Katie Hopkins, the right-wing columnist and broadcaster, to Tim Hayward, a university professor who has "great respect" for her.

The truth, though, is that her reports from Syria are basically crap. To see why, let's look in detail at one of her recent articles - a long one published by 21st Century Wire on April 8 and headed: " SYRIA: The Egregious Western Media 'Chemical Weapon' Fraud in Eastern Ghouta ".

Incendiary weapons

Confusingly in view of the title, the article starts by discussing napalm. Napalm is not classed as a chemical weapon - it's an incendiary weapon with horrible effects - and its use is restricted by the international Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons.

Beeley explains that napalm was an American invention and describes its historical use in various wars around the world. She complains that the US took almost 30 years to get around to signing the convention but seems not to have noticed that Syria still hasn't signed.

She also quotes a book by Robert Neer:

"Countries that have used napalm, in addition to the United States, include: Greece (the first use after World War II), France, Britain, Portugal, United Nations forces in Korea, the Philippines, South Vietnam and North Vietnam (in flamethrowers), Cuba, Peru, Bolivia, Israel, Egypt, Turkey, India, Iraq, Nigeria, and Brazil."

"Syria is not mentioned," Beeley announces, as if this somehow demonstrates the regime's innocence. It doesn't, of course. The word "include" in the paragraph quoted from the book makes clear it is not an exhaustive list.

Last week, in response to an enquiry by email, author Robert Neer explained why Syria was omitted. He completed the book in mid-2012 and had only listed the countries he knew about at the time (the first reported use of air-launched incendiary weapons in Syria came in November 2012  - too late for inclusion).

He also pointed out that there are other types of incendiary weapons besides napalm, so it's not always clear whether napalm itself has been used or another weapon that has similar effects.

The White Helmets: a 'propaganda construct'

The reason for Beeley's discussion of napalm appears to be a tweet posted by the White Helmets organisation in March saying that 37 civilians had been killed by a napalm attack in Eastern Ghouta.

An image of the tweet is reproduced at the top of Beeley's article with a caption saying the White Helmets are a "propaganda construct" created by Britain and the US, and that the tweet was one of their "many unsubstantiated claims".

Setting aside the White Helmets' claim about Eastern Ghouta, and the question of whether napalm itself or a napalm-like substance may have been used, there have been many other attacks in Syria with incendiary weapons. By September 2013, Human Rights Watch had already counted 56 of them.

There's no sensible reason for disputing the use of these weapons, because Russia has already provided confirmation. In 2016 its RT channel broadcast a report about the Russian defence minister inspecting Khmeimim airbase in Syria. Its footage ( here at 0.45) inadvertently showed a warplane fitted with incendiary bombs.

Accusations of fakery

Undiscouraged by that, though, Beeley proceeds to accuse the BBC of faking evidence of an incendiary attack. In August 2013 a BBC crew were filming at a hospital in northern Syria (outside the regime's control) when ambulances started arriving with youngsters suffering from burns - a school was said to have been hit by an incendiary bomb. The resulting footage, which is horrific, can be seen here (starting at 30:40).

The burns are obvious from the film but for Beeley it's all part of a media conspiracy. "Independent journalist, Robert Stuart, has masterfully and forensically exposed this report to be nothing more than war theatre orchestrated by the BBC," she writes.

In the face of such suffering it's a vile claim to make, but Beeley persists. She would have us believe the BBC faked the scenes "in order ratchet up UK military intervention in Syria, coinciding with the time of [British prime minister] David Cameron's vote in parliament to join the US bombing campaign in Syria".

In saying this she regurgitates a popular conspiracy theory that the BBC timed the broadcasting of its footage in order to influence the parliamentary debate taking place on the same day.

A closer look, though, shows it isn't true. The BBC's first report of the atrocity was broadcast on the 10pm news. At that point the debate - in which parliament rejected military action - was already over and MPs were in the process of voting, without access to televisions as they did so.

The BBC later said its footage had arrived from Syria at 9.30pm and had been broadcast at the first opportunity. More of it was shown in a Panorama documentary a month later.

Ignoring the chemical weapons investigators

Eventually Beeley's article arrives at the topic in its headline: the chemical weapon "fraud" (or, with the quote marks in the position favoured by her headline writer, the "chemical weapon" fraud).

The BBC report, she writes, "came hot on the heels of the alleged chemical weapon attack in Eastern Ghouta in August 2013 which was immediately blamed upon the Syrian government. Since then, that claim has been discredited by a number of analysts and independent experts."

Beeley persists in calling it an "alleged" attack although there are no longer any reasonable grounds for doubt. Laboratory tests on samples obtained by investigators from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) established that the nerve agent sarin had been used. Moreover, the sarin in question had a chemical signature linking it to the regime's stockpile.

One of the extraordinary things about Beeley's article is that in discussing chemical weapons it makes no mention at all of the OPCW's investigations. The reports by the OPCW's fact-finding mission -  all 18 of them  - are the most detailed source available of information about chemical weapons use in Syria.

Deaths in a tunnel

Beeley's scepticism about chemical attacks attributed to the regime is matched by her lack of it where allegations of chemical attacks by rebels are concerned. She writes:

"We know that terrorist chemical weapon attacks against the civilian population in West Aleppo were never given equivalent importance by the same 'humanitarian' minded nations, in fact they were largely ignored."

In support of this claim she links to another of her reports, in March this year, which talks about "an unidentified gas attack" in the Old City of Aleppo in August 2016. On that occasion, she says, three members of the Syrian government's civil defence team and 20 government soldiers lost their lives.

"I was able to talk to two surviving crew members who pieced together the events of that day. They told me that the terrorists had been tunneling to reach SAA positions in the Old City and that SAA special forces had discovered the tunnels and had entered them to confront the terrorists or to destroy the tunnels.

"It was hard to put the fragments of memory together into a coherent narrative but what the two crew members described was horrific."

She goes on to say:

"Both men were clearly still struggling with their memory of that day in August 2016 but piecing together what they could remember and combined with the lasting physical side effects, there seems no doubt that a CW [chemical weapon] of some kind was used against them.

"Why was it never reported by Western media nor listed as a war crime by the UN organisations that are mandated to document such crimes?"

That's presumably a rhetorical question, because with some simple checking Beeley could easily have found the answer. At the request of the Syrian government the events in the tunnel were thoroughly investigated by the OPCW which produced a 30-page report and said in its conclusions:

"Based on the evidence presented by the National Authority of the Syrian Arab
Republic, the medical records that were reviewed, the results of the sample analyses, and the prevailing narrative of all of the interviews, the FFM cannot confidently determine whether or not a specific chemical was used as a weapon in the investigated incident.

"From the results of the analyses of the samples, the FFM is of the opinion that none of the chemicals identified are likely to be the cause of death of the casualties in the reported incident."

Despite that, based on "fragments of memory" from the two men she spoke to, Beeley is in no doubt that a chemical weapon was used.

Chemical weapons - or just chemicals?

During the Syrian conflict there have been reports from time to time of chemicals being captured from rebels. The regime and its supporters generally present these discoveries as evidence of chemical weapons production even if the chemicals are everyday substances used by civilians.

Two recent chemical discoveries are described in Beeley's article. She writes:

"Journalist and geopolitical analyst, Sharmine Narwani, was in liberated Eastern Ghouta a few weeks ago when a Chemical Weapons laboratory was discovered in the farmlands ..."

In Beeley's account there is nothing "alleged" about this; a chemical weapons laboratory is what it is. Follow the link to Narwani's report (on the RT website), though, and the picture looks less certain: the headline speaks only of a "chemical lab". In her report Narwani describes what she saw:

"Upper rooms packed with electronic hardware, basements outfitted with large boilers, shelves filled with chemical substances, corners heaving with blue and black canisters (reportedly containing chlorine), chemistry charts, books, beakers, vials, test tubes and all the paraphernalia familiar to the average student of science. And then, in several corners, piles of pipe-shaped projectiles - clear munitions of some sort."

There was also a boiler and some kind of compressor. At the mention of chlorine (a common substance with multiple civilian uses), Narwani notes that it "has repeatedly been used in small quantities on the Syrian battlefield". For battlefield use, though, rebels would need chlorine gas. If the blue and black plastic containers shown in Narwani's photo did contain chlorine it would be in liquid form, since they were clearly not pressure vessels.

To her credit, Narwani remains ambivalent about the discovery. "Is this a chemical weapons lab?" she asks ... "Or simply a chemical lab manufacturing a substance used in warfare - like explosives?"

For no obvious reason, Beeley, on the other hand, is sure it's a chemical weapons lab.

Beeley's discovery

Beeley also describes a visit she made herself to a rebel "chemical weapons facility" in Eastern Ghouta on April 6 in the company of government forces. "I am grateful that they care enough about our safety to be with us on these trips and to provide answers to any questions we have," she writes.

Her article includes a series of photos of what she claims were "chemical weapon ingredients" - though it's clear from the article that she hadn't a clue what most of them were.

"Some of the bags containing the chemical ingredients were still booby trapped and therefore it was not possible to pick them up to show the labels more clearly. It was also very dark but I did my best to photograph everything I saw there.

"There were a number of sacks and barrels of ingredients, not all were easy to identify by the brand name on the bags and we were told that the terrorists had rebagged some of the ingredients. One of the bags contained the chemical compound RDX."

Based on what Beeley saw, it's hard to imagine how this could be justifiably described as a "chemical weapons facility". The only "chemical" she seems sure of is RDX which has nothing to do with chemical weapons: it's a common type of explosive.

But that's what the game is about. For allegations against the rebels, Beeley's threshhold of proof is so low that it's almost non-existent. For allegations against the regime it's so high that it may never be reached.

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Vanessa Beeley - the Syrian conflict's goddess of propaganda

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One spin-off from the Syrian conflict has been a war of words that reaches far beyond the Middle East. It's a battle in which honest reporting and the search for truth have come under sustained attack. Those leading the attack claim they are simply asking questions that need to be asked.

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Omar Sabbour on the White Helmets, May '18, Guardian

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Omar Sabbour on the White Helmets, May '18, Guardian

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Supporting the west? No, Syria's White Helmets are about saving lives | Omar Sabbour

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When rescue workers drag civilians from the rubble left by airstrikes, they don't pause to check who fired the missiles

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A Critique of Solidarity, Yassin Al-Haj Saleh, Al Jumhuriya, July '18.

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A Critique of Solidarity, Yassin Al-Haj Saleh, Al Jumhuriya, July '18.

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While generally well-intentioned, the concept of solidarity involves an unequal power relationship between those offering and receiving it. A preferable state of affairs would be partnership, placing Western activists and their counterparts elsewhere on equal footing.

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Libya under Gaddafi, Clay Clairborne, Summer '18

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Libya under Gaddafi, Clay Clairborne, Summer '18

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A CNN report last November about slave auctions in present-day Libya shocked the world. ¹ The existence of these slave auctions was widely treated as a new development in the country and a result of the chaos that resulted from the NATO-supported overthrow of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. In truth, however, what CNN discovered is but a surviving remnant of Gaddafi's regime-the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya-a police state with systematic racism and abuse both of Libyans of sub-Saharan African descent and of sub-Saharan African migrants.

Donald Trump has been wailing that U.S. immigration laws are "weak" because they provide some minimal protection to migrants and allow those fleeing from violence and repression to at least apply for political asylum. He would have loved the immigration policies of Gaddafi's Libya, which recognized no refugee status at all and fired on migrants with fatal effect for trying to enter, and even to leave, Libya without state permission. Also, no doubt, Trump would have cheered the extremely racist policies of Gaddafi and his government toward not only African migrants, but also Libyans of sub-Saharan descent, policies that included stripping black populations of Libyan citizenship, bulldozing their homes, bringing in helicopter gunships and tanks when they protested, and busing hundreds of thousands out to the desert to die.

We know about the "slave auctions" that CNN reported on, and many other things-both good and bad-in Libya today, because now the press enjoys freedoms it never had while Gaddafi ruled. It wasn't easy gathering information on Gaddafi's Libya. Human Rights Watch (HRW, 2009, 12) reported that when they visited Libya in 2005, the "first migrant our researchers interviewed on the street was arrested one hour later."

Nevertheless, there was research done on Libya, research that was available to all who cared to pay attention, which unfortunately didn't include a lot of the left. Here's what the record showed.
Gaddafi's Libya Was a Police State
This is the context for everything to be examined below: The Libya Gaddafi ruled was a poorly run police state. In 2004 Amnesty International (AI) did its first country report on Libya in 15 years. They found that government policy

includes the policy of "physical liquidation" of political opponents of the 1980s; numerous deaths in custody without adequate explanation; the "disappearance" of political prisoners, especially since 1996; and the "disappearance" of Libyan nationals abroad and foreign nationals visiting Libya. Hundreds of families still do not know whether their relatives are alive or dead, or how they died. Many are too scared to ask about their relatives for fear of retaliation. (AI, 2004, 3-4)

The report documented a number of such cases in detail, and also noted, "In 1980 the Libyan authorities introduced a policy of extrajudicial executions of political opponents, termed 'stray dogs.' The policy, known as 'physical liquidation,' seemed to have been endorsed at the highest levels." (5) AI added,

In recent years, the Libyan authorities have used the international context and the language of the "war on terror" to further justify the continuation of a repressive policy at home which severely curtails the right of Libyan citizens to freedom of expression and association. The "counter-terrorism" argument is clearly used as a new justification for an old practice, enshrined in Libyan law, of repression of all political dissent. (12)

AI also had some specific criticisms of Libyan law under Gaddafi, and highlighted these:

Law 71 of 1972 bans any form of group activity based on a political ideology opposed to the principles of al-Fateh Revolution of September 1, 1969.

Article 3 of Law 71 provides for the death penalty for forming, joining, or supporting groups prohibited by law.

Article 206 of the Penal Code (Law 48 of 1956) provides for the death penalty for those who call "for the establishment of any grouping, organization, or association proscribed by law," and even for those who belong to or support such an organization.

Article 208, which bans forming or joining an international association, states that "the punishment is imprisonment for whoever sets up, establishes, organizes, or directs international non-political organizations, associations, or bodies, or a branch thereof, without government authorization, or where such authorization is based on false or insufficient information."

Article 178 prescribes life imprisonment for the dissemination of information considered to "tarnish [the country's] reputation or undermine confidence in it abroad."

Article 207 states that "the punishment is execution for whoever spreads within the country, by whatever means, theories or principles aiming to change the basic principles of the Constitution or the fundamental structures of the social system or to overthrow the state's political, social, or economic structures or destroy any of the fundamental structures of the social system using violence, terrorism, or any other unlawful means." (19).

Two years before the Arab Spring uprising of 2011, the New York Times found that "Libya is a police state, but the trains still do not run on time." So government services at the time were awful ("Step one block off almost any main road and the streets here are badly damaged or completely unpaved. There are problems with the schools, the health care system, and the government bureaucracy, which is plagued by corruption and inefficiency. Untreated sewage is dumped right into the Mediterranean."), and on top of that, it was also the case that "the police here do not tolerate public criticism, and people still disappear in the night." ²
Migrant Sales Under Gaddafi
While CNN was able to document a few clandestine "slave auctions" in post-Gaddafi Libya, while Gaddafi ruled-nighttime slave auctions were common. Two or three times a week, the manager of a Kufra camp conducted the sale of several dozen migrants. A 26-year-old Eritrean told HRW,

Every two or three days, the manager of Kufra camp took 25 or 30 persons at night and sold them to Libyan transporters so he could get money from us. Other people were just thrown in the desert. Sometimes they would take people in the desert and run over their legs with a car and just leave them. He sold me with a group of 25 or 30 people to a Libyan man who put us in a big house in Kufra and told us we needed to have our families send $200 to pay for our release from Kufra and to take us to Benghazi. (HRW, 2009, 72)

Even children were used as slaves. One unaccompanied child, Kofi, an orphan from Ghana, was 16 years old while in Libya for one year in 2007. Kofi spoke of being pressed into forced labor after being detained by the Libyan authorities: "The guard took me out to work on his house. I worked all the time every day for four months, but he never paid me. Then he gave me to an Egyptian woman. I worked on her farm for seven months. She also didn't pay me, but she at least gave me food and clothes." (HRW, 2009, 62)

Gaddafi's Libya also regularly brought slaves back from its "adventures" in other African countries (Claiborne, 2011). Speaking of the Gaddafi-supported Arab supremacist terror campaigns in Sudan and Mauritania, Jeff Jacoby wrote in the Boston Globe, April 2, 1996, "Tens-maybe hundreds-of thousands of black Africans have been captured by government troops and freelance slavers and carried off into bondage. Often they are sold openly in 'cattle markets,' sometimes to domestic owners, sometimes to buyers from Chad, Libya and the Persian Gulf states." ³

In 1993, Augustine Lado, president of Pax Sudani, noted,

In 1990, Africa Watch concluded that there was evidence of kidnapping, hostage-taking and other monetary transactions involving human beings "on a sufficiently serious scale as to represent a resurgence of slavery." And a declassified report from the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum released last May by Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) documents how Sudan government troops and armed Arab militias are involved in massacres, kidnapping and the transporting of African Sudanese to Libya. ⁴

As we shall see, there can be no doubt that this required the support of the Libyan government. In March 1996, U.S. congressional hearings were held on "Slavery in Mauritania and Sudan" (U.S. House of Representatives, 1996), and while those two countries were the headliners, the subject of Libya kept popping up. For example, Augustine Lado told the hearing, "There has been very critical evidence that the people, our people, some of them were actually sold into slavery in Libya, Saudi Arabia, and other parts of the Arab world."

Charles Jacobs, research director of the American Anti-Slavery Group, testified,

As a result of the war, Arab militias, armed by the government of Khartoum, raid African villages, shoot the men and enslave the women and children. These are either kept as individual booty by the militias, sold north, or, as a recently declassified U.S. State Department document contends, trucked into Gaddafi's Libya.

He added,

Equally incomprehensible is the failure of Western human rights organizations to have marshalled public support for these black slaves. Today you are hearing directly from people who have seen slavery and who have interviewed slaves and escaped slaves in Mauritania and Sudan. But in fact evidence of slavery in Sudan, Mauritania, and Libya, compiled by the most prestigious and reliable sources, has been available for years. If the existence of chattel slavery in the last decade of the twentieth century is tragic, so is the failure of the human rights community to have developed an adequate activist constituency that could come to their aid.

This statement was made in a congressional hearing more than twenty years ago, and it is all still true today. Only now we can add the rank hypocrisy of journalists, politicians, and members of the white left who are suddenly "shocked, shocked" to discover slavery in Libya.
It is clear that the cause of human rights for refugees and immigrants in Libya, let alone the struggles against racism, human trafficking, and slavery there, could make little headway so long as the Gaddafi dictatorship ruled. Nevertheless, the white left seemed to discover slavery and racism in Libya only after the overthrow of the dictator, which they saw simply as a U.S. "regime change" operation, not a successful Libyan revolt. For example, Phyllis Bennis wrote an article in Fortune magazine (December 8, 2017) titled "How America Bears Responsibility for Libya's Slave Auctions." Bennis, after acknowledging that slavery's origins in many parts of the world "go back centuries," refers to "a new system of slavery," declaring that "the emergence of slave auctions in Libya has a more immediate basis as well: a catastrophic Western military intervention." ⁵

The word "emergence" puts the lie to her statement. Her interest is in using slavery to attack those that overthrew Gaddafi, not in ending slavery in Libya. To do that, you have to start with the truth. And the truth is that this problem didn't just arise with the fall of Gaddafi; it is the remnants of a regime of slavery that he cultivated for 42 years before Libyans changed that regime. Now they can begin to change this system.
The Exploitation Was Systematic
Under the Gaddafi regime, the exploitation of the refugee and of migrant flows was systematic and organized by the state. A major study by Sara Hamood (2006) for the American University in Cairo noted, "There are indications that smugglers and police or prison guards may cooperate in order to make financial gains, both from receiving payments in exchange for the release of detainees and from facilitating further travel by illegal means within or outside the country."

As refugee accounts from Libya at the time show, this was something of an understatement. Habtom, a 28-year-old Eritrean man who arrived in Libya in June 2008, explained, "The police know everything that happens in Libya. They know what is going on with the boats. They get their own share of the money. The only problem comes when the police don't get their share of the money or too little of it. If the government didn't like [the migrant smuggling] they wouldn't do it." (HRW, 2009, 53)

That government was the product of 39 years of Gaddafi rule at that point. The Hamood report (61) gives this picture of business as usual, Libyan style:

A stark example of this alleged corruption was related by an Ethiopian man, Y.U., granted humanitarian status in Italy, who was detained on arrival in Kufra after having crossed the desert in 2002. After about one year of detention without charge or trial for illegal immigration, he was released and told that he should return to Sudan, where he had lived prior to traveling to Libya. He and a group of others were driven to the border with Sudan, and at the last minute the Libyan police offered to take them back with them to Kufra for a fee. Each man paid $300 and they were indeed taken back by the police to Kufra. On arrival in Kufra, the police themselves took them to a smuggler who could arrange for their travel to Benghazi.

HRW (2009, 55) gives us this story:

Aron, a 36-year-old Eritrean who was detained at the airport jail in Tripoli in 2007, said that the cost for a bribe was either $500 in cash or about $800 for a wire transfer. After he paid the bribe, Aron said that a policeman in uniform took him from the jail in the police car and put him on the street in Tripoli. He later made an appointment with the policeman and "gave him money to release my friends." Aron said, "It's a rotating business. They take people out in the city, get money, and replace the prisoners with other Africans."

HRW also tells us (53-54) the story of Tomas, a 24-year-old Eritrean, who was part of a group of 108 migrants who resisted boarding a clearly unseaworthy vessel in October 2006. Navy officials intervened on the side of the Libyan criminals to force them onto the boat:

Once I saw that boat, I knew I would die if I went on it. They forced two people on the boat and the rest of us began fighting them. Many military men came and caught us at the boat.

The smugglers had an agreement with the Navy forces to take our money. They put us directly into the Navy port office. The people who demanded money from us were wearing Navy uniforms. They had an athletic build. They were clearly Navy, not coast guard. A high-level Naval officer spoke to us.

What surprises me is that the person who told us he would take us to Italy is the same person who arrested us. The ones who arrested us were in civilian clothes. Those who said they were going to take us were in uniforms. But they all arrested us together.

Tomas concluded, "I think the smugglers were 100 percent connected to the police and the military. I saw the officers in uniform with stars on their shoulders talking to the transporters. And the drivers said, 'There is no problem,' when we saw the police or military. The smugglers also told us if we didn't pay them that we would go to prison."

Like other countries that have exploited migrant labor, Libya encouraged this immigrant flow. As Hamood notes (18), "At the same time, Libya ran an internal and external campaign situating Libya in the African domain and encouraging Africans to come to work in Libya, even by placing advertisements in daily African newspapers."
Gaddafi's Libya Refused to Recognize Refugees
The Gaddafi regime took the position that there were no legitimate asylum-seekers in Libya and refused to grant anyone refugee status. As HRW reported in 2010, "Libya is not a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention and has no asylum law or procedure. In April, Libyan Foreign Secretary Moussa Koussa said his country 'does not have any refugees but only illegal migrants who break the laws'" (HRW, 2010a, 19-20).

Trump would have loved that guy; this guy too: Brigadier General Mohamed Bashir Al Shabbani, the director of the Office of Immigration at the General People's Committee for Public Security, told HRW (2009, 10), "There are no refugees in Libya. They are people who sneak into the country illegally and they cannot be described as refugees. Anyone who enters the country without formal documents and permission is arrested."

We can glean Muammar Gaddafi's views from this report on his 2009 visit to Italy:

During his first visit to Italy, in June 2009, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi said that the issue of asylum-seekers "is a widespread lie." He went on to say that Africans are "living in the desert, in the forests, having no identity at all, let alone a political identity. They feel that the North has all the wealth, the money, and so they try to reach it. ... Millions of people are attracted by Europe, and are trying to get here. Do we really think that millions of people are asylum-seekers? It is really a laughable matter." (HRW, 2009, 10)

Libyan oil money fueled conflicts in Nigeria, Chad, Niger, and Darfur that many of the refugees were fleeing (Claiborne, 2011). Commenting on Gaddafi's EU visit, Ethiopian author, poet, and journalist Hama Tuma (2010) wrote,

Over the years Libya has been accused of racism and of officially provoking the beating and killing of African migrants. Gaddafi's pan-African pretensions have always appeared shoddy and hollow as a consequence, and his recent statement in Europe-calling Africans ignorant and barbarian invaders-has nailed his coffin as an Arab racist.

For Gaddafi, the really big money to be made off the African migrants was the millions he got, some say extorted, from the European Union (EU) for all that he was doing to suppress that migration. That was what he was selling in Italy. ⁶ When he spoke to Italian senators in June 2009, he told them that the money he was already getting wasn't enough, saying, "Many billions of euros are needed to stem the flows of immigrants into the Mediterranean." ⁷ The BBC reported on his August 2010 visit, "Libyan leader Col. Muammar Gaddafi says the EU should pay Libya at least 5 billion euros (£4 billion; $6.3 billion) a year to stop illegal African immigration and avoid a 'black Europe.' Speaking on a visit to Italy, Col. Gaddafi said Europe 'could turn into Africa,' as 'there are millions of Africans who want to come in.'" ⁸

Needless to say, the millions of euros ⁹ paid to Libya went straight into bank accounts controlled by Gaddafi with no accountability.
Human Rights Abuses of Migrants in Gaddafi's Libya
In 2004 HRW reported,

Libya's recent immigration "reforms," introduced by Colonel Muammar Gadaffi, apparently after overtures from Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi, resemble a catalogue of human rights abuses against migrants and asylum-seekers. African internees and migrants in Libya are being detained in what one [member of the European Parliament] has described as "catastrophic conditions." And Libya continues forcibly to deport Eritrean refugees to Eritrea, where they face arrest, illegal detention and torture.

The Hamood report simply stated (5), "In Libya, refugees and asylum-seekers are not afforded adequate protection due to unclear policies regulating their stay in the country and to a lack of recognition of the specific legal status of refugees."

The UN Human Rights Council's 2010 review of Libya's record found that Libya "does not have a law on asylum-seekers and refugees"; that "Libyan women married to non-Libyan nationals are not granted equal rights with respect to the nationality of their children"; that personal status laws "do not provide for equal rights for women and men"; that there was a "discrepancy between the State's assessment, according to which Libyan society is ethnically homogenous, and information indicating that Amazigh, Tuareg, and Black African populations live in the country"; that there was an "absence of legislation prohibiting racial discrimination" and inadequate information "to guarantee that migrant workers are treated on a non-discriminatory basis"; and that Libyan laws prohibited "the use of languages other than Arabic or the registration of non-Arabic names for newborn children." (UNHRC, 2010b)

The U.S. State Department country report on Libya in February 2001 stated,

The government discriminates against and represses certain minorities and tribal groups. The government continues to repress banned Islamic groups and exercises tight control over ethnic and tribal minorities, such as Amazighs (Berbers), Tuaregs, and Warfalla tribe members. The government restricts basic worker rights, uses forced labor, and discriminates against foreign workers. There have been reports of slavery and trafficking in persons.

Hamood reported (22) that the Gaddafi regime used the immigration issue to promote racism in a way that is becoming increasingly familiar to Americans:

However, statements by Libyan officials reported in the media more regularly describe the phenomenon of illegal immigration in negative terms, describing it as an "invasion" (AFP, August 9, 2004) and recalling the heavy price Libya has paid for the rise in immigration, especially after the increase in smuggling activities. Migrants are often presented as causing wide-ranging problems in Libya related to health, cultural norms, social relations, and the economic situation. They are also portrayed as bringing about a degradation in the security situation. Thus, they are said to be at the heart of the rise in criminality, the spread of disease (particularly HIV/AIDs), the decline in morality, the economic downturn (brought about by the abundance of cheap labor), and even to be linked to "terrorism."

And Hamood noted (37) that these policies had results: "On 21 July 2004, 110 Eritrean nationals were returned from Libya to Eritrea, where they were at risk of torture. On arrival, they were arrested and reportedly held in incommunicado detention-that is without access to the outside world-in a secret prison. ... Until today, there is no news of their fate and whereabouts."
Migrant Detention Was Brutal in Gaddafi's Libya
The detained immigrants and refugees were imprisoned under squalid conditions and regularly beaten as more monetary demands were made of them. Tomas, the Eritrean mentioned earlier, recounted an experience he had while he was being held at Jawazat Prison in 2006:

One day we were singing songs. The guards came and said, "Who is making this noise?" The others said, "The Christians." (HRW, 2009, 81)

Migrants were subjected to very long periods of imprisonment in Gaddafi's Libya. A diplomatic source in Libya told HRW (2009, 74) that migrants could be detained " from a few weeks to twenty years."

Amina, a 19-year-old Somali woman, spoke about her experience in Kufra: "They held us for ransom. They hit me and the others too. They hit us with a special stick for hitting people. Every time the smuggler guard entered the room he beat us. He said that we needed to pay them money." (HRW, 2009, 59)

In late 2004, the European Commission interviewed some immigrant detainees in Libya and reported on the lack of due process they were receiving: "Throughout this period of detention, they had no access to a lawyer, nor were they presented before a judicial authority. In addition, no trial took place to establish their guilt or innocence, so far as they were aware" (Hamood, 31).

Instead of due process, beatings and torture were regularly used to resolve cases, as AI explained in 2004 (32):

From the testimonies collected by Amnesty International, it appears that if a detainee "confesses" quickly, they are usually subjected to light beatings or other forms of ill treatment. However, if a detainee refuses to "confess," torture is used in order to extract a "confession." The most frequently reported techniques are beatings with electric cables, beatings on the soles of the feet (falaqa), the use of electric shocks, and being suspended from a height by the arms.

Slavery, called "an obligation to perform labor," was also a feature of Gaddafi's detention system.

The 2001 State Department report stated,

In its report this year, the Committee of Experts of the International Labor Organization (ILO) stated that in Libya "persons expressing certain political views or views ideologically opposed to the established political, social, or economic system may be punished with penalties of imprisonment," including "an obligation to perform labor." The ILO report also noted that public employees may be sentenced to compulsory labor "as a punishment for breaches of labor discipline or for participation in strikes, even in services whose interruption would not endanger the life, personal safety, or health of the whole or part of the population."

There have been credible reports that the government arbitrarily has forced some foreign workers into involuntary military service or has coerced them into performing subversive activities against their own countries. Libyans, despite the Penal Code's prohibition on slavery, have been implicated in the purchase of Sudanese slaves, mainly southern Sudanese women and children, who were captured by Sudanese government troops in the ongoing civil war in Sudan.

The Hamood report (32-33) had this to say about the racist treatment African migrants received while in detention in Gaddafi's Libya:

Both men and women reported being regularly insulted by guards who used racist remarks. ...

A Sudanese man, A.K., reported being detained in al-Janzur Prison, near Tripoli, in 1996 for two days, during which time he, and more than forty other Sudanese arrested alongside him, were made to roll around in dirty water until they became dizzy and immediately forced to stand and run for short distances from wall to wall, causing some to fall to the ground. They also had dirty water poured on their heads.

An Eritrean man, B.G., granted humanitarian status in Italy in November 2004, also related having to roll around in dirty water, as well as being forced to stand in the burning sun for long periods of time. He was detained for one month in late 2002/early 2003. ...

D.G., an Eritrean asylum-seeker in Italy, was detained in 2003 for six months in four different locations. He described regular evening beatings and on one occasion being burned with a cigarette butt on his leg. He recalls the horrific experience of seeing a newly arrived inmate, a Chadian, being struck on the head with an iron stick which caused him to fall to the ground. The guards reportedly ignored the fall and continued to beat others. The Chadian detainee died shortly afterwards in the presence of D.G. and the guards. ...

As documented by Amnesty International, "the practice of unlawful detention after completion of sentence seems to be widespread."

In 2004 AI reported (24) on seven Eritrean refugees detained in Libya:

For some 18 months of arbitrary detention, the seven men lived in fear of being deported to Eritrea, where they would be at risk of serious human rights violations. They have been moved to several different prisons. In two separate instances, the men described being beaten with sticks; ... Michael Yemane Tekle said that he was particularly badly injured on the second occasion and lost consciousness after being hit over the head with a truncheon. ... The men told Amnesty International, "We just want to get out of detention. We have seen here in prison what we never saw in our country."

The most notorious killing in Gaddafi's prison system took place in 1996, although the regime denied it until 2004. It was mentioned in the 2010 report of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC, 2010a, 4), which summarized relevant human rights reports:

Libyan authorities had failed to adequately address the killings of up to 1,200 prisoners in the Abu Salim Prison, in June 1996. Most killings occurred the day after a riot took place sparked by appalling prison conditions as well as the denial of medical treatment and family visits. Official recognition of the facts came only eight years later, when the Libyan leadership acknowledged in February 2004 that killings did take place.

It should be added that in those eight years, while Gaddafi regime officials continued to deny family visits to the murdered prisoners, they continued accepting family payments into the dead prisoner's welfare fund.

The Abu Salim Prison massacre was far from the only one. It was just the most famous. Abukar, a 25-year-old Somali, was interviewed about a shooting at Ganfuda, a migrant detention center outside of Benghazi, where he had been held for more than a year. First, he spoke about their treatment: "The guards just keep us locked up here. They humiliate us. They beat us. If we talk to them, they punish us very hard. They hurt us with electricity." Then on August 10, 2009, "a group of Somalis and Nigerians saw the external gate was open and tried to escape. The guards opened fire on them. There were around thirty guards, but five did the shooting. I could see most of my friends were injured, and some fell to the ground" (HRW, 2009, 91).

Somali news sources reported twenty detainees had been shot and killed; Mareeg news website reported on it from Mogadishu: "At least twenty Somalis have been confirmed dead and fifty wounded in Bangazi town in Libya. The Libyan soldiers reportedly used knives and electric machines for torturing the Somali prisoners." ¹⁰
Route 666-the Migrant Ping-pong Path Through Libya
And, of course, sexual abuse in detention was pervasive. A twenty-year-old Somali man told HRW about a "special house" outside of Tripoli where migrants were held and where women were raped. Daniel, a 26-year-old Eritrean man, was also held in a smuggler's house in Tripoli where women were preyed upon. He was also detained in Misrata, where, he reported, "Every night the guards took women for their pleasure." It was even worse in Kufra, where "all feared that they would be left in the desert to die." Berihu, a 32-year-old Eritrean man, saw women taken away (HRW, 2009, 60, 61, 83-84, 78).

Sub-Saharan Africans trying to go north for a better life, or to escape war, followed a well-traveled route that usually started with paying a smuggler to bring them across the Sahara and the Libyan border to Kurfa. This account from the 2009 HRW report (64) is typical:

The smugglers were drug addicts. They didn't bring spare parts for the vehicle. We were left stranded in the desert with no food or water. The original agreement was to pay them $250 to go from Khartoum to Kufra. But in the middle of the desert the Sudanese turned us over to the Libyans, and they told us we had to pay another $300 or they would abandon us in the Sahara before we reached Libya. About 75 percent of us were able to pay. We paid for the other 25 percent, so no one was left.

Once in Kufra, they had to try to find transport to the coast while avoiding arrest and detention in desert outposts. Hamood (61) reports on an interview with B.M., an Eritrean man, about this leg of his journey:

On release from seven months' detention in Kufra in 2004, he explained, he was met by two officials, whom he understood to be the governor of Kufra and the director of the prison. They asked him how he had traveled to Libya, and he replied that he had come by means of a smuggler. The officials went on to offer to organize to take him and a group of 127 Ethiopians, who were released at the same time, to Benghazi for a fee of $200 per person. When the detainees said that they did not have the money to pay such a fee, they were transferred some 5 km into the desert to a detention camp and threatened with being abandoned there if they did not pay the money. After the detainees insisted that they did not have money, the officials suggested that they use the "hawala" system [an appeal to loved ones back home for money]. The detainees agreed and were taken to a farm, apparently owned by a police officer, while they waited for the money to arrive. Those who had money were released immediately, and once each group of twenty or so had paid their fee, they were sent with a smuggler in a pick-up truck to Benghazi. B.M.'s money arrived after a couple of days and he too was smuggled to Benghazi for $200.

By forcing immigrants to use the "hawala" system to save their lives, Gaddafi's oil-rich Libya was able to extort money, not only from the intrepid traveler, but also from the whole of impoverished sub-Saharan Africa.

If immigrants made it to one of the seaside cities, Tripoli, Misrata, Sirte, or Benghazi, they had to live like refugees no matter their legal status. That meant finding a boat out of there while avoiding arrest and living under conditions of complete illegality. Since both transport and living cost money, and as one fictitious refugee in North Africa famously said, "it was much more than we thought to get here," ¹¹ they probably also needed to find work while they waited and hid from the police. HRW (2009, 14) summarized its interviewees: "They said they feared being robbed, beaten, and extorted not only by common criminals, but also by the police. Many told HRW that they even feared children on the street, who often threw stones at them."

The Hamood report (40) gave additional details:

Typical examples of the problems mentioned by respondents from Sudan and the Horn of Africa are: Libyan youth throwing stones at them or hitting, spitting, or insulting them, often shouting "abeed" (meaning "slave" in Arabic). Both men and women described facing such harassment when walking in the street or taking public transport.

In 2000 The Economist reported that, "Black-bashing has become a popular afternoon sport for Libya's unemployed youths" ( The Economist, 2000). The Hamood report (41) noted that migrants also faced racist treatment from the police and other Libyan government agencies:

When relating the problems they faced from Libyan society, interviewees regularly described what they saw as a massive disparity between the treatment by police and other state officials of foreigners, particularly sub-Saharan Africans, and that of Libyan nationals. Those interviewed felt that they had no recourse to the police, who would never take action against a Libyan in the case of a dispute between a Libyan and a "black African."

Hamood added for clarification, "When probed, respondents using the term 'foreigners' explained that they specifically meant 'Blacks.'"

According to HRW (2009, 58),

Being mugged is a common experience for migrants, particularly for sub-Saharan Africans, in Tripoli and other cities, as is having children throw stones at them. Ermi, a 25-year-old Eritrean, expressed experiences and feelings shared by other migrants in interviews: "Even children took money from me. Libyans could beat me and I couldn't defend myself. Even their parents didn't stop them. The police back them up. Most of them don't know that we are human beings."

F.H., a Somali refugee interviewed in Egypt, told Hamood (40), "Libyans have a separate plate for their black servant and they refuse to eat from it after it has been used by them, they might even throw it away."

Such racist attitudes among the Arab population led to pogroms in Gaddafi's Libya. Hamood (40) reported on one occurrence:

The potential for this racism to have dangerous and even fatal consequences was borne out in 2000, when racist attacks against sub-Saharan Africans led to dozens of deaths and scores of injuries. Disturbances in Tripoli and neighboring al-Zawiyah soon spread to other parts of the country. Many sub-Saharan Africans found themselves homeless after their homes were burned and looted, forcing them to move to camps, "where on occasion members of the security forces failed to protect them from further attack. On at least one occasion, there were allegations of police involvement in the attacks." The attacks were followed by a wave of large-scale repatriations. In 2001 two Libyans, a Ghanaian, and four Nigerians were sentenced to death in connection with the attacks.

The October 12, 2000, report in The Economist provided additional detail:

Planeloads of bodies, dead and alive, flew back to West Africa from Tripoli this week, after Libya's worst outbreak of anti-foreigner violence since the expulsion of Italians and Jews in Muammar Gaddafi's coup in 1969. Survivors told of pogroms.

Emeka Nwanko, a 26-year-old Nigerian welder, was one of hundreds of thousands of black victims of the Libyan mob. He fled as gangs trashed his workshop. His friend was blinded, as Libyan gangs wielding machetes roamed the African townships. Bodies were hacked and dumped on motorways. A Chadian diplomat was lynched and Niger's embassy put to the torch. Some Nigerians attacked their own embassy after it refused refuge to nationals without proper papers-the vast majority.

Libyans sheltering Africans were warned that their homes would be next. Some of Libya's indigenous one million black citizens were mistaken for migrants, and dragged from taxis. In parts of Benghazi, blacks were barred from public transport and hospitals. Pitched battles erupted in Zawiya, a town near Tripoli that is ringed with migrant shantytowns. Diplomats said that at least 150 people were killed, 16 of them Libyans. The all-powerful security forces intervened by shooting into the air. ...

Over the past fortnight, hundreds of thousands of black migrants have been herded into trucks and buses, driven in convoy towards the border with Niger and Chad, 1,600 km (1,000 miles) south of Tripoli, and dumped in the desert.

Europe didn't have a problem with hundreds of thousands of Africans left by Gaddafi in the desert to die. There was no outcry, and U.S. members of the white left, from Cynthia McKinney ¹² to Dennis Kucinich, ¹³ continued to sing Gaddafi's praises. The migrants certainly couldn't call on the police for protection. There were no sanctuary cities in Gaddafi's Libya. Now, in Trump's America, illegal immigrants who have spent the better part of their lives in the United States may find themselves detained at any time. This was always the case in Gaddafi's Libya, where they might be detained for years, beaten, tortured, and sold into slavery or left to die in the desert. A European Commission team commented, "The detainees did not understand the reasons for their detention since many had already spent years in Libya, mostly working and establishing themselves on a temporary basis in the fringes of any process allowing legal residence." (Hamood, 31)

Maybe the reason for their detention was to squeeze them dry of what little they had accumulated by working and trying to establish themselves. However, even when they were lucky enough to find work as illegal immigrants, that didn't necessarily mean they would get paid for it, as the Hamood report (41) related:
The Return Route: Failed Boat Crossings Meant Death or Detention
The two most common problems faced were related to thefts, especially by Libyan youth, and not being paid their salary after having completed their work. M.A.A., a Somali refugee in Egypt, said, "Somalis prefer not working in Libya because they know they will be beaten and humiliated." M., a Darfurian asylum-seeker in Italy, elaborated further with a somewhat typical response, "Many people work and do not receive their salary at the end. If you ask for your money, they beat you and the police do nothing to help."

When migrants did find transport, they were likely to pay a premium for travel on a safe ship, only to later be forced onto a flimsy raft at gunpoint, with beatings. Then the motor would likely die in the first hours of the voyage, leaving them adrift. That's what happened to Daniel, the 26-year-old Eritrean:

The smugglers beat us with a stick to get us to board the boat. They crammed 264 of us onto the boat. There were pregnant women, babies, children. The captain of the boat said there were too many, but the smugglers wouldn't listen. After ten hours, the motor broke. We had no food or water. We drifted for five days. ... We were waiting to die. (HRW, 2009, 38)

The group got "lucky" and were found by a coast guard boat from Malta, which towed them back to Libya:

When we arrived, there were no doctors, nothing to help, just military police. They started punching us. They said, "You think you want to go to Italy." They were mocking us. We were thirsty, and they were hitting us with sticks and kicking us. For about one hour they beat everyone who was on the boat. Then they put us in a closed truck with only two little windows, not enough air to breathe. There was no food or water on the truck. It was 40 degrees centigrade outside but it felt like 80 degrees inside the truck. I thought we would all die inside the truck, but somehow we all survived. They first took us to Al Fellah Prison, but it was full, so they took us to Misrata Prison. (HRW, 2009, 39)

In a way, Daniel's boat really was lucky. If Gaddafi's Libyan Navy had found it, it might have been fired upon with live ammunition.

In 2010, for example, a Libyan patrol boat with Italian officers aboard opened fire on an Italian fishing trawler. Since Gaddafi had long been working with Berlusconi to suppress the refugee flow, they were both quick to patch things up, with the Italian interior minister explaining, "Perhaps [the Libyans] mistook the fishing boat for a boat with illegal migrants." Apparently, that was okay with the Italians, so they were willing to excuse it on that basis (HRW, 2010b). (It wasn't just refugees at sea who were met with lethal force: "West Africans describe similar problems when they enter Libya's southwestern frontier. Migrants said that border police would shoot at them" [HRW, 2009, 64])

If the Italian Navy found an immigrant boat, it might not be fired upon, but it would be returned to Libyan custody where the beatings would begin again. As HRW (2010b) reported, "Italy and Libya patrol waters near their borders to interdict boat migrants and return them summarily to Libya without screening ... to identify refugees, the sick or injured, pregnant women, unaccompanied children, victims of trafficking, or victims of violence against women."

Some of the migrant boats sank on the way to Europe, and, if they were lucky enough to be rescued, the passengers were brought back to Libya and imprisoned. This is what happened to Abdi Hassan, a 23-year-old Somali. He was imprisoned in Zleitan after the boat he was on sank and he was rescued. He described his release on July 7, 2008:

The head of the prison used me to translate an announcement to all the prisoners. He said, "It's time for business. Everyone has to pay us $1,000 for rescuing them at sea. Those who pay will be sent to the smugglers to help them go to Europe." Most of us paid the money. We were all released and taken by police car to the Abu Salim neighborhood and put at the door of the smuggler's house, back where we had started before our boat sank. (HRW, 2009, 88)
The Return Route-Deportation Back to Kufra
That was how the cycle was made to repeat itself until Gaddafi's Libya had squeezed the last dollar the poor immigrant had or could raise from the folks back home.

After varying periods of imprisonment and abuse in the coastal region, in which more money was extorted from them, they were likely to be transported back to Kufra for deportation from Libya. HRW (2010c) told of the aftermath of an immigrant prison protest:

Detainees told Human Rights Watch that Libyan guards severely beat them in the confrontation in Misrata, as well as on the way to al-Biraq; some were taken from Misrata to hospitals, while others arrived at al-Biraq with broken limbs. The detainees said they were given no food or water during the journey and no medical attention in al-Biraq. They also said that Libyan guards told them they would be deported to Eritrea.

Then as now, deportation to Eritrea meant "imminent torture or death at the hands of the brutal, dictatorial regime that rules Eritrea."14 The truck journeys themselves were "extremely dangerous and degrading. Migrants told HRW about being crammed into closed vehicles with almost no air. They would remain standing for a two-day journey, not allowed out even to urinate and defecate." (HRW, 2009, 71)

Being trucked to Kufra for deportation didn't necessarily mean that the migrants would get there. Very likely they would be released short of Kufra to traffickers who would take them back to Tripoli if they could pay, or leave them in the desert if they couldn't. "Libyan authorities in the coastal area put migrants (particularly from the Horn of Africa) in trucks and send them to Kufra purportedly to deport them across the land border with Sudan, but often they are not actually deported, rather simply left in the Libyan desert" (HRW, 2009, 70).

Tomas, the 24-year-old Eritrean we met above, was sent to Kufra after his failed boat attempt and a two-month stay in Jawazat Prison in Tripoli. He continues his story:

After two months, they put us with another group of Eritreans-150 people in all. They put us in a big truck packed with people. There wasn't room for anyone to sit down. ... The only air was from some open holes in the roof of the truck; otherwise it was completely closed. The truck drove us from Tripoli to Kufra. We started at 6 am and traveled all day and all the next night. The truck was closed the entire trip. There were cracks in the floor and people urinated on the floor, but my eyes were in pain from the smell.

We begged for air. The truck would stop for the drivers to take a break and eat, but they would not open the door for us. They were afraid we would run away. The worst was when we arrived in Kufra. At least the air circulated when we were moving. In Kufra, we stopped for two hours in 45 degree [Celsius] weather and we could hardly breathe. The truck was made of metal. They kept us in there for two hours as punishment because we were shouting during the journey. God is great; we all survived.

When they let us out of the truck, we were in Kufra prison. We spent one week there. They fed us food only once a day; rice only. Ramadan was over. I had already experienced two months of hunger in prison. We were now 800 prisoners crowded in different rooms. We slept on pieces of cardboard. There were no mattresses. It was dirty. The guards had no communication with us. They just opened and closed the doors.

Kufra is the border place for deportation. They just let you go from there because there is no place to go. There are always three nationalities there: Sudanese, Eritreans, and Ethiopians. They cast you back to your country at Kufra. They don't actually take you to the border; they just let you go.

But the smugglers have an agreement with the prison commander. When they let us go, we are ready for market. The drivers wait for us outside the Kufra prison and make deals to take us to Tripoli. The drivers say that they have paid money to get us out of prison. They then take us out of the city to a place in the open bush.

The drivers told us we had to pay them money since they had paid to get us released from prison. We had either to pay the 40-dinar bribe to get us out of prison or $400 to get to Tripoli. The only way to do that is to call your family to have them send money. My family sent money and I went back to Tripoli. (HRW, 2009, 72-73)

The 2009 HRW report (14-15) described how a truck ride to Kufra, ostensibly for deportation, was turned into a way of recycling the poor immigrant through Libya again to squeeze more money out of him or her:

Libya trucks migrants from the coastal areas to its land borders to deport them. Migrants from the Horn of Africa, including Somalia and Eritrea, are sent by truck to Kufra in Libya's remote southeastern corner to be deported into Sudan. In some cases, however, they are not actually deported. Instead, according to testimony from migrants, they are left in the desert within Libyan territory. In practice, this means that such migrants have no choice but to put their lives in the hands, once again, of the smugglers who brought them from Kufra to Benghazi or Tripoli in the first place, usually abusing them along the way.
The Bounce-from Kurfa Back to the Coast
Sub-Saharan migrants sent to Kufra for "deportation" were turned over to the human traffickers or simply left to die in the desert, depending on whether they can still pay or not. Many saw the bodies of migrants who had been left in the desert to perish. Madihah, a 24-year-old Eritrean woman, was left in the desert by smugglers and saw what happened to others who had been similarly abandoned: "I walked to Libya after being dropped in the desert. I saw the bodies of Eritreans and their ID cards there in the desert-two ladies and a boy who looked Eritrean. It took 24 days to get through the desert" (HRW, 2009, 64).

If they could pay, the cycle repeated until they reached Europe or died trying. Ghedi, a 29-year-old Somali, described how he had to bargain for his release from Kufra detention center in April 2008: "The first time I paid $300 and was not released. Then I paid another $500 and was released. It was at night. The smugglers and the police-or the army-were the same. They were all the same" (HRW, 2009, 76). As HRW summarized the pattern in its 2009 report (72),

Although the authorities transport migrants to Kufra for the supposed purpose of expelling them overland to Egypt or Sudan, in fact the Kufra authorities sometimes do not actually take them to the border but rather leave them in the desert outside Kufra or make deals with smugglers who pick them up to start the process again.

For those few lucky enough to finally reach the "promised land" of Italy, this 2009 Reuters article, titled "'Modern slave' migrants toil in Italy's tomato fields," gives us an idea of what they could expect:

Every year thousands of immigrants, many from Africa, flock to the fields and orchards of southern Italy to scrape a living as seasonal workers picking grapes, olives, tomatoes and oranges. Broadly tolerated by authorities because of their role in the economy, they endure long hours of backbreaking work for as little as 15-20 euros ($22-$29) a day, and live in squalid makeshift camps without running water or electricity. ...
Arab Supremacy Is the Child of White Supremacy
"It's a feudal system like in the Middle Ages. These modern slaves are handy for the economy: you can exploit them and then get rid of them when you don't need them anymore," said Father Arcangelo Maira, a local priest trying to help the immigrants. ... "They left their country and came here hoping to find an El Dorado, but they end up living in conditions that are often worse than what they had at home," said Benelli. ¹⁵
Libyan Racism Under Gaddafi
White supremacy developed out of the European practice of enslaving Africans in the Western Hemisphere. ¹⁶ Arab supremacy is a derivative of white supremacy. It emerged relatively recently, in the wake of World War I and the fall of the Ottoman Empire. While historically the Arabs also enslaved Africans, the practice never played the critical economic role for them that it did for the Europeans who built empires with slaves. Far from providing the material basis for racist ideology, Arabs trafficked mainly in African women, who were prized for their beauty. They were sold into harems, where they were integrated into the culture and bore their master's children. This was not American-style racial slavery. Those children became full heirs to their fathers' names, legacies, and fortunes, no matter how dark they were. That is why African blood can be seen in almost every Arab face. The vile hatred for that African blood practiced by Muammar Gaddafi and the other Arab supremacists who supported him had a different genesis. It aped the customs and practices of the white racism that seemed to be doing so well as the 300-year-old Ottoman Empire was collapsing. As Jihan A. Mohammed put it, "The emergence of the Arab supremacy was a reaction to the Western powers, Western colonialism, and imperialism in the early twentieth century." ¹⁷

Tomas, the 24-year-old Eritrean, remembers the racism as well as the abuse he experienced in Libya: "They called me 'nigger' as they beat me" (HRW, 2009, 89).

It is a fitting tribute to the fatherhood of white supremacy that these Arab speakers used an English word to insult these Africans. "Nigger" is a racial slur for Africans that developed in the United States in the 1700s along with slavery. ¹⁸ The Hamood report (29) noted the effects of this racism on African migrants:

For sub-Saharan Africans, there are additional difficulties faced from society at large, notably racism. Testimonies of some of the Egyptian respondents, as well as those of sub-Saharan Africans, describe a situation in which sub-Saharan Africans face greater difficulties both from state officials, such as police officers and prison guards, and from ordinary members of society by virtue of the color of their skin.

For Hama Tuma (2010), the responsibility for these racist policies came straight from the top:

For all his claims to the contrary, Gaddafi has no respect for Africa or Africans. This is not just manifested by how very inhumanely he treats African workers and asylum-seekers, nor by his self-declaration as the King of All African tribes, but mainly by his deeply ingrained chauvinism and pretension to be an African Messiah. No wonder he refers to Africans as starved and ignorant and violates the rights of Black Africans in Libya.

In 2010 the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights compiled reports on Libya's human rights record, including on ethnic and racial discrimination in government policy. Some of these addressed the plight of the Berber, or Amazigh, people, who would later be among the strongest supporters of the revolution:

Some 10 percent of the Libyan population was estimated to be of Amazigh origin. Tens of thousands of Tuareg people migrated from Niger and Mali to the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya in search for jobs after the disastrous drought in the Sahel countries in the 1970s. But the Libyan government insisted on the Arab identity of the country and described claims of Amazigh identity as a colonial invention. Despite the fact that the Amazigh were the indigenous population of North Africa, on March 1, 2007, the Libyan leadership has publicly stated that no Berbers were living in North Africa. These remarks have caused an outcry among the Amazigh community in North Africa. STP [The Society for Threatened Peoples] reported that the president of the World Amazigh Congress wrote an open letter and protested against the denial of the existence of 30 million Amazigh in North Africa. Libyan Amazigh were facing ostracism, exclusion, and broad discrimination, stated the letter. (UNHRC, 2010a, 6)

The Toubou, too, faced awful conditions:

STP recalled that massive discrimination of the Toubou minority had been reported from the southeastern part of the country. Some 4,000 Toubou people are living in the town of Kufra, an oasis city of 44,000 inhabitants some 2,000 kilometres from Tripoli. In the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, they were treated as foreigners by the authorities. In December 2007, the Libyan government withdrew citizenship from members of the Toubou group, stating that they were not Libyans but Chadians. Furthermore, the local authorities issued decrees barring Toubou from access to education and health care services. The armed movement Front for the Salvation of the Toubou Libyans has opposed these measures, and up to 33 people died in Kufra during five days of fighting between the official security forces and the Toubou in November 2008. (UNHRC, 2010a, 7)

A report for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace summarized events this way:

Throughout the late 1990s and into the 2000s, the Toubou in Kufra saw their livelihood decline precipitously, with the majority of Toubou confined to ghetto-like conditions in the districts of Swaydiya and Qaderfi. In 2007, Gaddafi withdrew Libyan nationality from many Toubou in Kufra, effectively depriving them of health care, housing, jobs, and education. In response, local Toubou formed the Front for the Salvation of Libyan Toubou; widespread rioting and protests ensued. In 2008, the regime suppressed a major Toubou uprising in Kufra, deploying helicopter gunships and tanks. (Wehrey, 2012)
White Supremacy and the Green Book
In 2009-2010, the repression continued, including these examples of Israeli-style discrimination: "Since November 2009 dozens of families lost their homes due to forced destruction by bulldozers supervised by state security forces. Several dozens of Toubou were arrested because of their opposition against the forced evictions." Moreover, "Libyan authorities refused to renew or extend passports to members of this minority. Several times parents were prevented from registering births of their children and denied birth certificates. According to STP, the Libyan government is responsible for a deliberate policy of ethnic cleansing in Kufra, which violates both Libyan and international law" (UNHRC, 2010a, 7).

The Green Book is a 19,054 word "book " that Muammar Gaddafi published six years after his 1969 military coup. It sets out the philosophy and political structures of his "revolution." When asked to explain the Green Book, Professor Dirk Vandewalle of Dartmouth College said,

I must admit it's very difficult to understand, in part because it really is not a coherent thought if you compare it, for example, to "The Little Red Book" of Mao and so on, where you get at least a consistent argument. The Green Book contains really a set of aphorisms more than a completely thought-out, integrated philosophical statement. ¹⁹

And yet, it was supposed to serve as the supreme law of the land. It has very little to say directly about black people, but what it does say panders to the racist mythology behind the so-called threat of "white genocide" ²⁰ that so worries white supremacists. It is also right in line with Gaddafi's fear-mongering, anti-migrant sales pitch to the EU. Under the heading "Black People Will Prevail in the World," the Green Book declares,

The latest age of slavery has been the enslavement of Blacks by white people. The memory of this age will persist in the thinking of Black people until they have vindicated themselves.

This tragic and historic event, the resulting bitter feeling, and the yearning or the vindication of a whole race, constitute a psychological motivation of Black people to vengeance and triumph that cannot be disregarded. In addition, the inevitable cycle of social history, which includes the Yellow people's domination of the world when it marched from Asia, and the white people's carrying out a wide-ranging colonialist movement covering all the continents of the world, is now giving way to the re-emergence of Black people.

Black people are now in a very backward social situation, but such backwardness works to bring about their numerical superiority because their low standard of living has shielded them from methods of birth control and family planning. Also, their old social traditions place no limit on marriages, leading to their accelerated growth. The population of other races has decreased because of birth control, restrictions on marriage, and constant occupation in work, unlike the Blacks, who tend to be less obsessive about work in a climate which is continuously hot. ²¹

Those 215 words are the sum total of what the Green Book has to say about black Africans in this North African country, although it does peddle its national chauvinism throughout the text with little tidbits like, "People are only harmonious with their own arts and heritage. They are not harmonious with the arts of others because of heredity." ²²
Conclusion
It's no wonder that today Muammar Gaddafi's words are featured on extremist websites like InfoWars, ²³ Daily Stormer, ²⁴ and Stop White Genocide. ²⁵

On February 17, 2011, a united majority of the Libyan people, including Arabs, Amazigh, Tuareg, and black Africans, rose up and put an end to the madness and oppression that was the 42-year reign of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. They received substantial help from NATO "allies" that had their own economic-crisis-driven reasons for insuring that the flow of Libya's light-sweet crude was not long interrupted, reasons that caused NATO countries to support Gaddafi's crackdown before they opposed it.

While the UN-authorized, NATO-implemented, no-fly zone stopped Gaddafi from doing to Libya what Bashar al-Assad has been allowed to do to Syria, the heavy lifting of defeating Gaddafi's armed repression, the fighting on the ground, was done by people's militias organized by the Libyans themselves. They succeeded in doing what no other "Arab Spring" revolt was able to do: They succeeded in completely smashing the dictatorial state machinery, including its instruments of violent repression!

Of course, overthrowing the government is just the first half of the revolutionary process. The process Libya is going through now, typically a ten-year process, is the one in which the people, hopefully, replace the dictatorship with something better. The future is not predestined, however. Ten years after their revolution, the French got Napoleon, and ten years after our revolution we were still hashing out the U.S. Constitution.

Post-Gaddafi Libya also faces some special problems. Gaddafi's unique style of "governance" left Libya with almost nothing like normal civil and government institutions. If you've gotten to this point in this essay, you know that is something of an understatement. Civil society has to be created virtually from scratch.

Generations of Libyans have no experience living outside of a police state and no tradition of carrying out ordinary civil functions like voting, joining civil discourse, or running for office. Generations grew up in an environment in which racism wasn't just tolerated, it was encouraged from the highest levels of law and government. They were also largely abandoned by the white Western left, which discredited communism with their counterfeit versions, failed to criticize Gaddafi when he was in power, didn't notice the revolt until NATO changed sides, and then threw their support behind the fascists because NATO came around to needing to be rid of Gaddafi fast.

Libya deserves criticism for practices of racism, slavery, and immigrant abuse that continue there today, but the left should not join the imperialists in propagating the counter-revolutionary mythology that these features are new to Libya or have gotten worse since Gaddafi was overthrown. Rather it must be recognized that his overthrow was but the first necessary step to correcting these ills. Libya is still trying to overcome Gaddafi's legacy, and those efforts should be supported, not denigrated, by progressive people around the world.

Footnotes

Notes
1. Nima Elbagir, Raja Razek, Alex Platt, and Bryony Jones, " People for sale: Where lives are auctioned for $400," CNN, Nov. 14, 2017.
2. Michael Slackman, "A Leader Beyond Reproach Limits the Possibilities for Political Change," New York Times, March 19, 2009.
3. Boston Globe.
4. Augustine Lado and Betty Hinds, "Where Slavery Isn't History," Washington Post, Oct. 17, 1993.
5. .
6. Bjarte Vandvik, 2010, " The EU's dubious refugee deal," Guardian commentary, 20 Oct. Vandvik is secretary general of the European Council on Refugees and Exiles.
7. Quoted here.
8. BBC.
9. Europa.
10. Mareeg News and Information.
11. Casablanca.
12. Adam Holland, "Cynthia McKinney and the Society of Supporters of the Green Book," March 9, 2011.
13. See Clay Claiborne, "Dennis 'the Menace' Kucinich," LinuxBeach, Apr. 4, 2017.
14. Herman Grech, "Malta deportees tortured in Eritrea, Amnesty says," Times of Malta, May 19, 2004; "Stop Eritrean Deportations Now," Oct. 18, 2017, assenna.com/31406-2/.
15. Silvia Aloisi, "'Modern slave' migrants toil in Italy's tomato fields," Reuters, Sept. 28, 2009.
16. See Clay Claiborne, "News Flash Chris Hedges: There is no such thing as 'white blood,'" Linus Beach, March 6, 2017.
17. Jihan A. Mohammed, " Arab Supremacy," July 11, 2014.
18 Randall Kennedy, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word (Pantheon, 2001), excerpted here.
19. " All Things Considered," March 3, 2011.
20. ADL, White Genocide.
21. Green Book.
22. Green Book.
23. Infowars.
24. Daily Stormer.
25. Stop White Genocide.

References
Amnesty International, 2004. " Libya: Time to make human rights a reality," April, MDE 19/002/2004.
Claiborne, Clay, 2011. " Helter Skelter: Qaddafi's African Adventure," Aug. 9.
The Economist, 2000. " Pogrom," Oct. 12.
Hamood, Sara, 2006. " African Transit Migration Through Libya to Europe: The Human Cost," American University in Cairo.
Human Rights Watch, 2004. " Closed-door Immigration Policy Is Shameful Vision," Sept. 15.
Human Rights Watch, 2009. " Pushed Back, Pushed Around: Italy's Forced Return of Boat Migrants and Asylum Seekers, Libya's Mistreatment of Migrants and Asylum Seekers."
Human Rights Watch, 2010a. " Rights on the Line: Human Rights Watch Work on Abuses Against Migrants in 2010."
Human Rights Watch, 2010b. " Libya: End Live Fire Against Suspected Boat Migrants," Sept. 16.
Human Rights Watch, 2010c. " Libya: Do Not Deport Eritreans," July 2.
Tuma, Hama, 2010. " Of Gaddafi and Arab racism towards Blacks," Afrik-News, Sept. 3.
UN Human Rights Council, 2010a. "Summary prepared by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in accordance with paragraph 15 (c) of the annex to Human Rights Council resolution 5/1," July 15.
UN Human Rights Council, 2010b. "Compilation prepared by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in accordance with paragraph 15 (b) of the annex to Human Rights Council resolution 5/1," July 21.
U.S. House of Representatives, 1996. Subcommittees on International Operations and Human Rights and Africa of the Committee on International Relations, " Slavery in Mauritania and Sudan: Joint Hearing," 104th Cong., 2nd sess., March 13.
U.S. Dept. of State, 2001. " Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, Libya, 2000," Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, Feb. 23.
Wehrey, Frederic, 2012. " The Struggle for Security in Eastern Libya," Carnegie Endowment, Sept. 19.

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A CNN report last November about slave auctions in present-day Libya shocked the world. 1 The existence of these slave auctions was widely treated as a new development in the country and a result of the chaos that resulted from the NATO-supported overthrow of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.

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Daphne Lawless 'Against Campism' Nov '15

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Daphne Lawless 'Against Campism' Nov '15

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By Daphne Lawless, Fightback Tāmaki Makarau
At the time of writing, Russian forces are intervening in the civil wars in Ukraine and Syria; supporting the rebellions in the eastern provinces in the first case, and dropping bombs in support of the government of Bashar al-Assad in the second.

While he may have been a general in the old KGB, Vladimir Putin is no socialist. While Russia is formally 'democratic', political rights are very limited for anyone not aligned with Putin's United Russia party. Notoriously, queer communities are persecuted by means of a law against "homosexual propaganda", and Putin has fought a bloody civil war to quell the independence struggle in the republic of Chechenya. Neo-liberal economics has been used to cut living standards every bit as fiercely as it has in the West.

So why would anyone on the Left support Russia intervening in Ukraine or Syria, any more than they support the United States in Iraq or Afghanistan? Because they do. Leftist magazines like Counterpunch support Russian bombs falling in Syria. Several leftists in Aotearoa/NZ are members of a Facebook group called "Vladimir Putin Fan Club NZ. Putin it right !!" (sic)
Multipolar disorder
Several arguments have been used by such people. Perhaps the most serious is that in favour of a "multipolar world". The argument is that the current world neoliberal system hinges on the unchallenged hegemony of the "Western" bloc, under the military leadership of the biggest imperial power of the planet, the United States. Therefore, a "multipolar" world would mean more freedom for popular forces to move against the global neoliberal order.

The late President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela was a great promoter of this idea. Many Western leftists who supported his government's struggle for the working people and poor at home were left scratching their heads as he toured the world shaking hands and doing deals with the authoritarian leaderships of Russia or China, or Libya's Qadhafi. He even supported the Zimbabwean government of Robert Mugabe, which imprisons and tortures socialists, and counted as an ally the Belarusian president Aleksander Lukashenko, who boasts of "wringing the necks" of the political opposition.

As an isolated leader of a socialist government in a capitalist state, Chávez can't be blamed for trying to get any help he could. But for those of us without the responsibilities of state power, making a virtue out of necessity is not the basis for a political strategy.

This kind of politics is often called "campism" - in the metaphor that the world is divided into several military "camps", with the largest being the Western camp led by the United States. Therefore, any government which disagrees with American foreign policy - no matter how oppressive to its own people, or however wedded to neoliberal market economics - can be supported. These governments are even called "anti-imperialist" - as if there were only one imperialism, that of the Western bloc. Those who've been watching China's moves to extend its military reach across East Asia, or its economic power in Africa, have good reason to question that.
When two camps go to war...
The best argument which has been made to explain this thought process is that it's a left-over from the Cold War, when the world was (at first) divided between the Western/USA bloc under the slogan of "freedom", and the Eastern/Soviet bloc under the slogan of "peace". Later, China emerged as the leader of a third bloc under a slogan of "national independence".

At the time, many Western leftists saw the Soviet Union or China as "workers' states", which were a better alternative to capitalism. This led to many twists and turns as local parties and movements jumped around to justify the foreign policy of their preferred foreign "socialist" country. It was an article of faith for such groups that since their preferred country was "socialist", it could not be imperialist, based on Vladimir Lenin's analysis that imperialism was the highest stage of capitalism. Therefore, even when the Soviet Union ransacked eastern Germany's industrial base after the Second World War, or invaded Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan to support its puppet regimes, this could not be "imperialist" by definition.

In contrast, other socialists refused to take sides. They described themselves as supporters of a "Third Camp" - opposing both the Western/US camp, and the camp of the bureaucratic states claiming to be socialist, with the "camp" of independent working-class action. The Socialist Workers Party in Britain led with the famous slogan of "Neither Washington nor Moscow, but international socialism". During the workers' uprising in Poland in the 1980s, while other socialists were trying to justify a Russian-backed military crackdown on the Solidarity independent union, the SWP's newspaper headline read: "Russian tanks, Western banks, hands off Solidarity."
Old slogans
One way to see the love-fest for Putin or other "anti-imperialist" dictatorships is simply a leftover from the days of the Soviet Union. Of course neither Russia nor Syria claim to be any sort of socialist country. But when you've spent a long time in the habit of thinking that the real problem in the world is American military hegemony - rather than the global capitalist system which that hegemony really serves - then you can justify any oppressive regime which is anti-American.

The "campists" even still use the old Soviet sloganeering - for example, when they claim that the Russian-backed rebels in Eastern Ukraine are fighting "fascists" in the Ukrainian government. While there certainly are some vile fascist mobs backing the Kiev regime, the mobs who rule the "Novorossiya" zones are only different in the symbols they use. Like the USA uses "anti-terrorism" as an excuse for conquest today, so did the old Soviet Union use "anti-fascism"; the official name of the Berlin Wall was the "Anti-fascist Protection Barrier".

One sure sign of a campist mindset is that vile behaviour which is condemned on the other side is condoned on one's own side, or outright denied. Campists are rightly outraged at the beheadings, sex slavery and other barbaric practices of the Islamist extremist group Da'esh (also known as ISIS). But they keep their mouths shut about the Syrian government's use of "barrel bombs" and poison gas against opposition forces - even arguing that their chemical attack on Ghouta in the suburbs of Damascus was a "false flag" operation.
We are all pawns
The use of the term "false flag" brings up the close alliance of "campism" with conspiracy theory. Campism, which sees the world as something like a "game board" where various governments move their pieces, can't accept the concept of independent action by oppressed peoples or the working masses. So, every uprising against an "anti-imperialist" government is rejected as a CIA-backed "colour revolution". It's no coincidence that RT, the Russian government-backed news channel, promotes American conspiracy theorists who are considered a joke in their own media.

And of course the United States have an interest in overthrowing such governments and replacing them with reliable toadies. But to believe that that nullifies the existence of real grassroots movements within such uprisings is to reject the idea that socialist revolution is possible at all, that everything is secretly manipulated by some government or secret service or other such conspiracy. As one British socialist put it: "If you can't fight for yourself, either because you are too weak or too isolated the temptation is to look for other forces who can do it for you."

The kind of mindset which could defend Zimbabwe or North Korea as "anti-imperialist" could end up actually supporting Da'esh, on the basis that the democratic Syrian opposition forces have accepted guns from the West - and this is indeed what at least one group calling itself "communist" has declared. It is the logic that "stability" under a dictatorship is better than a chaotic situation of uprisings - a point of view which should be associated with conservative "realists", not revolutionary socialists.
The enemy at home?
Other times, you hear the argument that"the main enemy is at home", and therefore we have to oppose our own governments, not foreign governments. "The main enemy is at home" is a slogan that the German socialist Karl Leibknecht used to oppose the Social Democrats' sell-out to support the First World War, which was justified with the argument that the Tsar of Russia was a much worse tyrant than the Kaiser of Germany.

But the people using that slogan to support the Syrian or Russian governments on this issue ignore that Liebknecht was opposed to all the imperialist governments fighting in the war. He certainly didn't support the Russian government of the time any more than he cheered on his own. And of course he supported the Russian Revolution which brought down the Tsar from below - not the German armies on the Eastern Front.

We certainly want to oppose our own government. So we have to oppose New Zealand military intervention in Syria, Ukraine or any other civil conflict, and deny any support for the United States military or any Western-backed coalition - just as we oppose the barbarism of the Russian or Syrian governments or Da'esh. But we can't let ourselves become useful idiots for any other oppressive regime. To bring up the World War 1 example again, Lenin accepted a train ride from the German regime to get back into Russia; but he certainly never supported the Kaiser as a "lesser evil" to the Tsar.
Neither Labour nor National...
We can find campism not only in foreign politics, but domestic politics. You see this in America with the demands that the socialist Left fall in behind the Democratic candidate - even if that's the thoroughly imperialist and pro-capitalist Hilary Clinton - because apparently a Republican victory would be worse than a zombie apocalypse.

Similarly in Aotearoa/New Zealand, we see the division of electoral politics into two "camps" - a National-led camp, and "the Left", being defined as Labour, Greens and New Zealand First. The first two parties are enthusiastically in favour of neoliberal capitalism, and the third support traditional "national" forms of capitalism. None of them has anything to offer the struggle for tino rangatiratanga, real action against climate change or independent workers' organization - and yet, we are confronted with aggressive demands that we support "the Left" electorally, as if a government of Andrew Little, Winston Peters and James Shaw would be a significant improvement on the John Key regime.

In fact, the over-the-top denunciation of Key - a rather bland merchant banker, interested in entrenching neoliberalism rather than extending it - paradoxically reveals that there is no real difference between the two "camps". Because that's the real secret of campism - someone who aggressively demands that you take a side between two evils has an interest in concealing that the two camps are really not that different. Campism is born of weakness and lack of faith in the ability of real popular forces to build their own alternative to Washington, Moscow, Beijing, Damascus, Wellington and all the others. But that is precisely what socialism is supposed to be about.
Special thanks to Sam Charles Hamad and John Game for ideas and research pointers on this topic. A few helpful links:

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Against campism: What makes some leftists support Putin?

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By Daphne Lawless, Fightback Tāmaki Makarau At the time of writing, Russian forces are intervening in the civil wars in Ukraine and Syria; supporting the rebellions in the eastern provinces in the first case, and dropping bombs in support of the government of Bashar al-Assad in the second.

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A Venezuelan opposition demonstrator waves a flag at the riot police © FEDERICO PARRA/AFP/Getty Images

Six protesters executed for social media posts

Teenagers arrested and abused without justification
View latest press releases

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Venezuela crisis mission: Protesters executed for social media posts

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A Venezuelan opposition demonstrator waves a flag at the riot police © FEDERICO PARRA/AFP/Getty Images Six protesters executed for social media posts Teenagers arrested and abused without justification View latest press releases

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'...there is a difference between scepticism and denial'

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A lesson from Syria: it's crucial not to fuel far-right conspiracy theories | George Monbiot

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Wild stories about a chemical weapon massacre in Syria gained traction. How that occurred is a matter of serious concern, writes Guardian columnist George Monbiot

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Shadi Hamid on Libya, April 2016, Brookings Institution  

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Shadi Hamid on Libya, April 2016, Brookings Institution  

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Editors' Note: It has perhaps never been more important to question the prevailing wisdom on the 2011 United States-led intervention in Libya, writes Shadi Hamid. Even with the benefits of hindsight, he argues, many of the criticisms of the intervention fall short. This post originally appeared on Vox.

Libya and the 2011 NATO intervention there have become synonymous with failure, disaster, and the Middle East being a " shit show" (to use President Obama's colorful descriptor). It has perhaps never been more important to question this prevailing wisdom, because how we interpret Libya affects how we interpret Syria and, importantly, how we assess Obama's foreign policy legacy.

Of course, Libya, as anyone can see, is a mess, and Americans are reasonably asking if the intervention was a mistake. But just because it's reasonable doesn't make it right.

Most criticisms of the intervention, even with the benefit of hindsight, fall short. It is certainly true that the intervention didn't produce something resembling a stable democracy. This, however, was never the goal. The goal was to protect civilians and prevent a massacre.

Critics erroneously compare Libya today to any number of false ideals, but this is not the correct way to evaluate the success or failure of the intervention. To do that, we should compare Libya today to what Libya would have looked like if we hadn't intervened. By that standard, the Libya intervention was successful: The country is better off today than it would have been had the international community allowed dictator Muammar Qaddafi to continue his rampage across the country.

Critics further assert that the intervention caused, created, or somehow led to civil war. In fact, the civil war had already started before the intervention began. As for today's chaos, violence, and general instability, these are more plausibly tied not to the original intervention but to the international community's failures after intervention.

The very fact that the Libya intervention and its legacy have been either distorted or misunderstood is itself evidence of a warped foreign policy discourse in the U.S., where anything short of success-in this case, Libya quickly becoming a stable, relatively democratic country-is viewed as a failure.

NATO intervened to protect civilians, not to set up a democracy

As stated in the U.N. Security Council resolution authorizing force in Libya, the goal of intervention was "to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack." And this is what was achieved.

In February 2011, anti-Qaddafi demonstrations spread across the country. The regime responded to the nascent protest movement with lethal force, killing more than 100 people in the first few days, effectively sparking an armed rebellion. The rebels quickly lost momentum, however.

I still remember how I felt in those last days and hours as Qaddafi's forces marched toward Benghazi. In a quite literal sense, every moment mattered, and the longer we waited, the greater the cost.

It was frightening to watch. I didn't want to live in an America where we would stand by silently as a brutal dictator-using that distinct language of genocidaires-announced rather clearly his intentions to kill. In one speech, Qaddafi called protesters "cockroaches" and vowed to cleanse Libya "inch by inch, house by house, home by home, alleyway by alleyway."

Already, on the eve of intervention, the death toll was estimated at somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000. (This was when the international community's tolerance for Arab Spring-related mass killings was still fairly low.)

As Obama's advisers saw it, there were two options for military action: a no-fly zone (which, on its own, wouldn't do much to stop Qaddafi's tanks) or a broader resolution that would allow the U.S. and its allies to take further measures, including establishing what amounted to a floating no-drive zone around rebel forces. The president went with the latter option.

The NATO operation lasted about seven months, with an estimated death toll of around 8,000, apparently most of them combatants on both sides (although there is some lack of clarity on this, since the Libyan government doesn't clearly define "revolutionaries" or "rebel supporters"). A Human Rights Watch investigation found that at least 72 civilians were killed as a result of the NATO air campaign, definitively contradicting speculative claims of mass casualties from the Qaddafi regime.

Claims of "mission creep" have become commonplace, most forcefully articulated by the Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations. Zenko may be right, but he asserts rather than explains why mission creep is always a bad thing. It may be that in some circumstances, the scope of a mission should be defined more broadly, rather than narrowly.

If anything, it was the Obama administration's insistence of minimizing the mission-including the absurd claim that it would take "days, not weeks"-that was the problem from the very start. Zenko and others never make clear how civilians could have been protected as long as Qaddafi was waging war on them.

What Libya would look like today if NATO hadn't intervened

It's helpful to engage in a bit of counterfactual history here. As Niall Ferguson notes in his book Virtual Alternatives, "To understand how it actually was, we therefore need to understand how it actually wasn't."

Applied to the Libyan context, this means that we're not comparing Libya, during or after the intervention, with some imagined ideal of stable, functioning democracy. Rather, we would compare it with what we judge, to the best of our ability, the most likely alternative outcome would have been had the U.S. not intervened.

Here's what we know: By March 19, 2011, when the NATO operation began, the death toll in Libya had risen rapidly to more than 1,000 in a relatively short amount of time, confirming Qaddafi's longstanding reputation as someone who was willing to kill his countrymen (as well as others) in large numbers if that's what his survival required.

There was no end in sight. After early rebel gains, Qaddafi had seized the advantage. Still, he was not in a position to deal a decisive blow to the opposition. (Nowhere in the Arab Spring era has one side in a military conflict been able to claim a clear victory, even with massive advantages in manpower, equipment, and regional backing.)

Any Libyan who had opted to take up arms was liable to be captured, arrested, or killed if Qaddafi "won," so the incentives to accept defeat were nonexistent, to say nothing of the understandable desire to not live under the rule of a brutal and maniacal strongman.

The most likely outcome, then, was a Syria-like situation of indefinite, intensifying violence. Even President Obama, who today seems unsure about the decision to intervene, acknowledged in an August 2014 interview with Thomas Friedman that "had we not intervened, it's likely that Libya would be Syria...And so there would be more death, more disruption, more destruction."

What caused the current Libyan civil war?

Critics charge that the NATO intervention was responsible for or somehow caused Libya's current state of chaos and instability. For instance, after leaving the Obama administration, Philip Gordon, the most senior U.S. official on the Middle East in 2013-'15, wrote: "In Iraq, the U.S. intervened and occupied, and the result was a costly disaster. In Libya, the U.S. intervened and did not occupy, and the result was a costly disaster. In Syria, the U.S. neither intervened nor occupied, and the result is a costly disaster."

The problem here is that U.S. intervention did not, in fact, result in a costly disaster, unless we are using the word "result" to simply connote that one thing happened after a previous thing. The NATO operation ended in October 2011. The current civil war in Libya began in May 2014-a full two and a half years later. The intervention and today's violence are of course related, but this does not necessarily mean there is a causal relationship.

To argue that the current conflict in Libya is a result of the intervention, one would basically need to assume that the outbreak of civil war was inevitable, irrespective of anything that happened in the intervening 30 months.

This makes it all the more important to distinguish between the intervention itself and the international community's subsequent failure-a failure that nearly all the relevant actors acknowledge-to plan and act for the day after and help Libyans rebuild their shattered country.

Such measures include sending training missions to help the Libyan army restructure itself (only in late 2013 did NATO provide a small team of advisers) or even sending multinational peacekeeping forces; expanding the United Nations Support Mission in Libya's (UNSMIL) limited advisory role; and pressuring the Libyan government to consider alternatives to a dangerous and destabilizing political isolation law.

While perhaps less sexy, the U.S. and its allies could have also weighed in on institutional design and pushed back against Libya's adoption, backed by UNSMIL, of one of world's most counterproductive electoral systems-single non-transferable vote-along with an institutional bias favoring independents. This combination exacerbated tribal and regional divisions while making power sharing even more difficult.

Finally, the U.S. could have restrained its allies, particularly the Gulf States and Egypt, from excessive meddling in the lead-up to and early days of the 2014 civil war.

Yet Libya quickly tumbled off the American agenda. That's not surprising, given that the Obama administration has always been suspicious of not just military entanglements but any kind of prolonged involvement-diplomatic, financial, or otherwise-in Middle East trouble spots. Libya "was farmed out to the working level," according to Dennis Ross, who served as a special assistant to President Obama until November 2011.

There was also an assumption that the Europeans would do more. This was more than just a hope; it was an organizing principle of Obama administration engagement abroad. Analysts Nina Hachigian and David Shorr have called it the " Responsibility Doctrine ": a strategy of "prodding other influential nations...to help shoulder the burdens of fostering a stable, peaceful world order."

This may be the way the world should operate, but as a set of driving assumptions, this part of the Obama doctrine has proven to be wrong at best, and rather dangerous at worst.

We may not like it-and Obama certainly doesn't-but even when the U.S. itself is not particularly involved in a given conflict, at the very least it is expected to set the agenda, convene partners, and drive international attention toward an issue that would otherwise be neglected in the morass of Middle East conflicts. The U.S., when it came to Libya, did not meet this minimal standard.

Even President Obama himself would eventually acknowledge the failure to stay engaged. As he put it to Friedman: "I think we [and] our European partners underestimated the need to come in full force if you're going to do this."

Yet it is worth emphasizing that even with a civil war, ISIS's capture of territory, and as many as three competing "governments," the destruction in Libya still does not come close to the level of death and destruction witnessed in Syria in the absence of intervention.

In other words, even this "worst-case scenario" falls well short of actual worst-case scenarios. According to the Libya Body Count, around 4,500 people have so far been killed over the course of 22 months of civil war.

In Syria, the death toll is about 100 times that, with more than 400,000 killed, according to the Syrian Center for Policy Research.

We're all consequentialists now

For the reasons outlined above, Libya's descent into civil conflict-and the resulting power vacuum, which extremist groups like ISIS eagerly filled-wasn't inevitable. But let's hypothesize for a moment that it was. Would that undermine support for the original intervention?

The Iraq War, to cite the most obvious example, wasn't wrong because it led to chaos, instability, and civil war in the country. It was wrong because the decision to intervene in the first place was not justified, being based as it was on faulty premises regarding weapons of mass destruction.

If Iraq had quickly turned out "well" and become a relatively stable, flawed, yet functioning democracy, would that have retroactively justified an unjustified war? Presumably not, even though we would all be happy that Iraq was on a promising path.

The near reverse holds true for Libya. The justness of military intervention in March 2011 cannot be undone or negated retroactively. This is not the way choice or morality operates (imagine applying this standard to your personal life). This may suggest a broader philosophical divergence: Obama, according to one of his aides, is a "consequentialist."

I suspect that this, perhaps more than narrower questions of military intervention, drives at least some of the revisionism over Libya's legacy. If we were consequentialists, it would be nearly impossible to act anywhere without some sort of preordained guarantee that a conflict area-which likely hadn't been "stable" for years or decades-could all of a sudden stabilize.

Was the rightness of stopping the Rwandan genocide dependent on whether Rwanda could realistically become a stable democracy after the genocide was stopped? And how could policymakers make that determination, when the stabilization of any post-conflict situation is dependent, in part, not just on factual assessments but on always uncertain questions of the international community's political will-something that is up to politicians-in committing the necessary time, attention, and resources to helping shattered countries rebuild themselves?

The idea that Libya, because it had oil and a relatively small population, would have been a relatively easy case was an odd one. Qaddafi had made sure, well in advance, that a Libya without him would be woefully unprepared to reconstruct itself.

For more than four decades, he did everything in his power to preempt any civil society organizations or real, autonomous institutions from emerging. Paranoid about competing centers of influence, Qaddafi reduced the Libyan army to a personal fiefdom. Unlike other Arab autocracies, the state and the leader were inseparable.

To think that Libya wouldn't have encountered at least some major instability over the course of transition from one-person rule to an uncertain " something else " is to have a view of political development completely detached from both history and reality.

A distorted foreign policy discourse

The way we remember Libya suggests that the way we talk about America's role in the world has changed, and not for the better. Americans are probably more likely to consider the Libya intervention a failure because the U.S. was at the forefront of the NATO operation. So any subsequent descent into conflict, presumably, says something about our failure, which is something we'd rather not think about.

Outside of the foreign policy community, politicians are usually criticized for what they do abroad, rather than what they don't do. As former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates put it, "[Qaddafi] was not a threat to us anywhere. He was a threat to his own people, and that was about it." If the U.S had decided against intervention, Libya would have likely reverted to some noxious combination of dictatorship and insurgency. But we could have shirked responsibility (a sort of inverse " pottery barn " principle-if you didn't break it, you don't have to fix it). We could have claimed to have "done no harm," even though harm, of course, would have been done.

There was a time when the United States seemed to have a perpetual bias toward action. The instinct of leaders, more often than not, was to act militarily even in relatively small conflicts that were remote from American national security interests. Our country's tragic experience in Iraq changed that. Inaction came to be seen as a virtue. And, to be sure, inaction is sometimes virtuous. Libya, though, was not one of those times.

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Everyone says the Libya intervention was a failure. They're wrong.

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Editors' Note: It has perhaps never been more important to question the prevailing wisdom on the 2011 United States-led intervention in Libya, writes Shadi Hamid. Even with the benefits of hindsight, he argues, many of the criticisms of the intervention fall short. This post originally appeared on Vox.

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The epic failure of our age: how the west let down Syria

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The seven-year conflict has marked a tipping point in the balance of power between the US and Russia, and has triggered a strategic disaster whose ramifications are still playing out