In Libya, Bani Walid Pays Price for Refusing to Accept the Mark of the Beast

By Gerald A. Perreira | Last updated: Nov 13, 2012 - 1:21:42 PM

Gerald A. Perreira is a founding member of the Guyanese organizations, Joint Initiative for Human Advancement and Dignity and Black Consciousness Movement Guyana. He lived in Libya for many years, served in the Green March, an international battalion for the defense of the Al-Fateh revolution and was an executive member of the World Mathaba based in Tripoli. In part one of this commentary, he deals with the assault on the Libyan town of Bani Walid. The town has refused to bow to the NATO-installed government. Perreira provides a riveting picture of what is happening on the ground and the forces behind the events one year after the killing of Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi. The North African country remains fractured, violence remains endemic and Western liberation has not brought security or peace. This is part one of a two-part article.

An injured child receives medical treatment at a hospital in Bani Walid, about 185 kilometers southeast of Tripoli. Deadly clashes between armed groups have rocked Bani Walid, considered a final bastion of support of slain Libyan leader Col. Muammar Gadhafi, as a siege of the hilltop town was partially lifted, residents said. Fighters from Bani Walid—a town still seen by many Libyans as never truly ‘liberated’ in last year’s fighting—clashed with militiamen from the nearby city of Misrata who have encircled it in their search for killers of a former rebel credited with capturing the slain Gadhafi last year. Photo: MAHMUD TURKIA/AFP/GettyImages

It is a year since the brutal killing of Muammar Gadhafi and the installation of NATO’s proxy government in Tripoli. The installed government is not in control and heavily armed militias and foreign mercenaries are running the show. This past year has been one of chaos and savagery.

Thousands have been hunted down, imprisoned or killed. Hundreds of thousands have fled to neighboring countries to flee the persecution. The images emerging from the current siege of Bani Walid are gruesome. NATO’s henchmen are attacking their own people with bombs and chemical weapons, injuring and killing scores of civilians. Women, children and old people lie maimed or dismembered on the side of the roads, many of them buried in the rubble.

Residents tell stories of bombs filled with burning toxic gases and white phosphorous raining down from missiles. Scorched victims of the constant shelling are proof of the sinister nature of the Islamist militias and the fascist government forces which have been ordered to use “all necessary means to deal with Bani Walid.” Where is the “international community” condemnation? Where is Amnesty International? And where is NATO? Why has the Security Council not called an emergency session to address this atrocity? Where is the “humanitarian intervention?” Russia finally put forward a draft statement to the UN Security Council calling for “a peaceful resolution to the ongoing crisis”—a lukewarm response to a “killing fields” scenario and even this was blocked by the U.S. This is the freedom sanctioned by NATO in Libya—accept the mark of the beast or die.

Where is the African Union?

Ethnic cleansing of people with Black skin is being carried out by Arab Supremacists and where is the African Union? The answer is that its troops, drawn from neo-colonial African countries, are mired down in Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, fighting imperialism’s battles under the command of AFRICOM. Since Gadhafi’s murder, all but three African countries have accepted U.S. military occupation in the form of AFRICOM. And what about the Eurocentric left in the U.S., Europe, Canada and elsewhere—it seems they are so confused over Libya and the Arab Spring thing, that they are unable to put up any effective opposition to the murder and mayhem that their governments are perpetrating. It is so much more comfortable and easier all round to join the frenzy over Pussy Riot free speech controversy in Russia, while the siege of Libya and Bani Walid, which can easily be compared to the “killing fields” of Cambodia, is unfolding before their eyes. There is no question that the Islamist militias that have surrounded Bani Walid are certainly on a par with the Khmer Rouge.

Everything you can imagine and everything you can’t…

Bani Walid, like many other towns and neighborhoods loyal to the Al-Fateh revolution, has been under constant siege since NATO first invaded. Two years later the residents have no food, water, electricity, medicine or even oxygen for the hospitals but they have set up their own television station which broadcasts daily, and no matter how desperate their situation they continue to resist the savage hordes at the gates of their city. The current onslaught is part of a killing and maiming spree which has been ongoing since the NATO-led invasion of the Libyan Jamahiriya. It is only in recent days that the dominant global media has broadcast news from Bani Walid, and only then because the horror of what is taking place there could no longer be ignored.

The events that have unfolded in Libya over the past year have occurred away from the eyes of the world. Imperialist media outlets, such as BBC, CNN and Al Jazeera were told to turn their cameras off so that NATO’s thugs could quietly engage in a cleanup operation, that is, to finish off the necessary racial and ideological cleansing. NATO expected that these vicious militias would have finished the “mop-up” by now, but once again they failed to understand the true dynamic of this battle.

There is no doubt that NATO has destroyed much of Libya but that was an attack on material structures—albeit a devastating one. However, this battle is not being fought on the material plane alone. It is therefore wholly different from anything that the North Atlantic Tribes can conceive of. They should take note of a catch phrase taken from an old Libyan tourism poster which describes the Jamahiriya as “everything you can imagine and everything you can’t.” This is a battle being fought on many planes, including the metaphysical plane—it is not something that can be exterminated with physical force alone, no matter how great that force is.

The real revolution will definitely not be televised…

Bani Walid is a bastion of resistance, sheltering many of those who fled the Black Libyan town of Tawergha and numerous Africans living in Libya, all of whom are escaping the persecution meted out towards anyone whose skin is Black. The Muslims of Bani Walid refused to accept that people with Black skin are to be hunted and killed, since this is antithetical to the teaching of Islam. There are Libyans of every skin shade in Bani Walid—Libyans who believe in Muammar Gadhafi’s vision of a truly independent Libya taking its rightful place in a United States of Africa. On the anniversary of the slaying of Shaheed Muammar Gadhafi, we salute the heroic resistance of all those at Bani Walid, Sirte, Abu Salim, Janzur, Kufra and all over Libya, all of whom are willing to die rather than accept the “mark of the beast.”

Let our defiant brothers and sisters in Bani Walid know that they should not worry about the fact that their cause is receiving little or no corporate global media attention. They dare not televise the real revolution. Nevertheless, the real revolution is acknowledged by millions of people throughout the world who stand in solidarity with the real revolutionaries, inspired by some of the greatest acts of defiance and resistance seen in our times.

This is how the battles of Sirte and Bani Walid will be recorded by us. In the words of the Brother Leader: “I live in a place where you cannot reach me. I live in the hearts of millions of people.”

Neo-colonialism, chaos haunt the new Libya (FCN, 08-24-2012)

Witnessing the Transition to Fear in Tripoli, Libya (FCN, 09-16-2011)

Minister Farrakhan's Press Conference on U.S., NATO War Against Libya (FCN Video, 06-15-2011)

Gold, Oil, Africa and Why the West Wants Gadhafi Dead (FCN, 06-07-2011)

An Analysis of Muammar al-Gadhafi's Green Book (FCN, 06-18-2010)