Libya

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An interesting blog post in an otherwise staunchly pro-American newspaper, providing extensive statistics about Gaddafi's regime:

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Libya: A Revolution for Democracy or an Oil War?

V Raghunathan at Times of India Blogs.

Living in a country where there is enough to be outraged about every minute of the day, it is not very often that one takes time off to be outraged about something happening in another continent. But then there are times, one cannot simply live in one’s own cocoon, even if the cocoon happens to be a sub-continent sized country at war with corruption.

It started with an e-forward (and we all receive our share) from a good friend. It contained an article titled ‘The Truth About Libya’ by Stephen Goodson, who is presumably the same Goodson who sits on the board of the Central Bank of South Africa; and unseated mining honcho, Brian Gilbertson, from the Bank's Board" in 2003 and was the leader of leader of Abolition of Income Tax and Usury Party, a political party registered with South African with the Electoral Commission.

The article itself said this:

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"Colonel Muammar Gadaffi is frequently referred to in the media as a "mad dictator" and "bloody tyrant", but do these allegations accord with the facts?

Libya consists of over 15O tribes, with the two main groups, the Meghabra living in Tripolitania in the west and the Wafallah living in Cyrenaica in the east. Previous attempts to unite these tribes by the Turkish (1855-1911) and ltalian {1911-43) colonial rulers failed and the country was split in two for administrative purposes.

Oil was discovered in Libya in 1959, but King ldris of the Senussi tribe allowed most of the oil profits to be siphoned into the coffers of the oil companies. The coup d'etat on 1 September 1969 led by Colonel Gadaffi had countrywide support. He subsequently married a woman from the royal Barqa tribe and adroitly unified the nation.

By retaining Libya's oil wealth for the benefit of all its people, Gadaffi had created a socialist paradise. There is no unemployment, Libya has the highest GDP in .Africa, less than 5% of the population is classified as poor and it has fewer people living below the poverty datum line than for example in Holland. Life expectancy is 75 years and is the highest in Africa and I0% above the world average.

With the exception of the nomadic Bedouin and Tuareg tribes, most Libyan families possess a house and a car. There is free health care and education and not surprisingly Libya has a literacy rate of 82%. Last year Gadaffi distributed $500 to each man, woman and child (population 6.5 million).

Libya has a tolerable human rights record and stands at 61 on the International Incarceration Index, comparable with countries in central Europe (the lower the rating, the lower the standing - the USA occupies the no.1 spot!). There is hardly any crime and only rebels and traitors are dealt with harshly.

Anyone who has read Gadaffi's little Green Book will realize that he is a thoughtful and enlightened leader. Libya has been accused of having committed numerous acts of terrorism in the past, but many of these have been perpetrated by foreign intelligence agencies as false flag operations - the Lockerbie bombing being a prime example.

The CIA and MI6 and their frontmen have been stoking up dissent in the east of the country for almost 30 years. Libya produces exceptionally high quality light crude oil and its production cost of $1 a barrel, compared to the current price of $115, is the lowest in the world.

Riba (usury) is not permitted. The Central bank of Libya is a wholly-owned by the Libyan Government and is run as a state bank, issuing all government loans free of interest. This is in contrast to the exploitative fractional reserve banking system of the West. The no-fly zone and the bombing of Libya have nothing to do with the protection of civilians. It is an act of war a blatant and crude attempt by the oil corporations and international bankers to steal the wealth of Libya."

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Now, Gadaffi is not among my favorite leaders, to put it mildly. Not by a long shot. There is plenty that’s wrong with the boorish man. He is a ruthless and cruel dictator; a loose cannon; and of questionable balance of mind, even if I envy him his beautiful body-guards. But that’s not the only criteria upon which you judge the state of a nation. So, notwithstanding Goodson’s credibility, I did some double check of some facts about Libya.

I found that Libya, as recently as 2010, ranks No. 55 out of 172 countries in the world in the Human Development Index of UNDP, with a score of 0.755 (0.749 in 2009), and counts among the countries with High Development Indices, comparable to some of the European countries. Libya has the highest HDI in Africa and is way ahead of India at 0.519 (ranked 122), for example.

According to UNDP "the Human Development Index or HDI (developed in 1990 by Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq and Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen) is a comparative measure of life expectancy, literacy, education and standards of living for countries worldwide. It is a standard means of measuring well-being, especially child welfare."

How about the Human Rights record of Libya? Well, in general, high development index is supposed to be highly correlated with Low incidence of human rights violations. So not surprisingly, Guardian, based on Amnesty International reports, does not feature Libya in the list of 20 worst offenders in the world.

Also, according to UNDP, Libya’s literacy (subsumed in HDI as well) in 2009 was 86.8%, way ahead of India, leave alone Pakistan or Bangladesh. Yes, corruption in Libya has been high. However, according to Transparency International, from 2005 until 2009, it corruption in Libya was no higher than corruption in Philippines, Pakistan, Belarus, Bangladesh, Indonesia or Nepal. And yet, for some surprising reason, in 2010, all these countries have suddenly become less corrupt than Libya! Now usually, corruption levels in countries do not change drastically overnight. What could then explain the overnight drop in the corruption rating, after having been ahead of these countries for five years before suddenly losing their rating? Could the 2010 ranking of Libya be somewhat stilted, thanks to some hanky-panky by the Western Powers?

By these parameters, it would seem that the dictatorship in Libya has not been as bad as it has been painted out to be. In virtually every conceivable dimension, Libya’s track record has been well above most Asian countries, leave alone African. And if there has been a rebellion or a revolution in Libya, it is easy to see how it may well have been the result of much aid and abetting by the US under the convenient excuse of the wave of democratic movement in other parts of Africa and West Asia. If it was the dictatorship that moved the US to support the Libyan movement, one wonders why a Burma never benefited from this democratic concern of the US.

But then Burma is poor country. Not oil rich like Iraq and Libya are. Gadaffi may well have been a notorious dictator just as Saddam was. But one wonders if the rebels ‘win’ would truly help the people of the country or open up a long sequence of disquiet amidst a host of disparate groups warring with each other, as in Iraq. But yes, the oil-hungry US with a plummeting economy may well be a beneficiary of the Libyan movement – way more than the Libyan people.

I cannot but agree with Goodson. And one can’t agree with him without being outraged as a citizen of the world.