Tragic Libyan NATO agenda exposed
Correspondent | Friday March 18, 2016 13:56
Libya was relegated to the back burner by the State Department, “as the country dissolved into chaos, leading to a civil war that would destabilise the region, fueling the refugee crisis in Europe and allowing the Islamic State to establish a Libyan haven that the United States is now desperately trying to contain.
US-NATO intervention was allegedly undertaken on humanitarian grounds, after reports of mass atrocities, but human rights organisations questioned the claims after finding lack of evidence.
Today, however, verifiable atrocities are occurring. As Kovalik wrote “the human rights situation in Libya is a disaster, as thousands of detainees languish in prisons without proper judicial review, and kidnappings and targetted killings are rampant.” Before 2011, Libya had achieved economic independence, with its own water, its own food, its own oil, its own money, and its own state-owned bank. It had arisen under Qaddafi from one of the poorest of countries to the richest in Africa. Education and medical treatment were free. But that was before US-NATO forces bombed and wreaked havoc on the country. The then Secretary of State’s victory lap was indeed premature, if what we’re talking about is the officially stated goal of humanitarian intervention
Of the 3,000 emails released from Hillary Clinton’s private email server in late 2015 dated April 2, 2011, reads in part: “Qaddafi’s government holds 143 tons of gold, and a similar amount in silver. This gold was accumulated prior to the current rebellion and was intended to be used to establish a pan-African currency based on the Libyan golden Dinar. This plan was designed to provide the Francophone African Countries with an alternative to the French franc (CFA)”. French intelligence officers discovered this plan shortly after the current rebellion began, and this was one of the factors that influenced President Nicolas Sarkozy’s decision to commit France to the attack on Libya.
According to these individuals, Sarkozy’s plans were driven by the following issues:
l A desire to gain a greater share of Libyan oil production,
l increase French influence in North Africa,
l improve his internal political situation in France,
l provide the French military with an opportunity to reassert its position in the world, and
l address the concern of his advisors over Qaddafi’s long term plans to supplant France as the dominant power in Francophone Africa. Conspicuously absent is any mention of humanitarian concerns. The objectives are money, power and oil. Qaddafi’s threatened attempt to establish an independent African currency was not taken lightly by Western interests. In 2011, Sarkozy reportedly called the Libyan leader a threat to the financial security of the world. How could this tiny country of six million people pose such a threat? It is banks, not governments that create most of the money in Western economies.This has been going on for centuries, through the process called “fractional reserve” lending. Originally, the reserves were in gold. In 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt replaced gold domestically with central bank-created reserves, but gold remained the reserve currency internationally.
In 1944, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB) were created to unify this bank-created money system globally. An IMF ruling said that no paper money could have gold backing. A money supply created privately as debt at interest requires a continual supply of debtors; and over the next half century, most developing countries wound up in debt to the IMF.
The loans came with strings attached, including “structural adjustment” policies involving austerity measures and privatisation of public assets. After 1944, the US dollar traded interchangeably with gold as global reserve currency. When the US was no longer able to maintain the dollar’s gold backing, in the 1970s it made a deal with OPEC to “back” the dollar with oil, creating the “petro-dollar.” Oil would be sold only in US dollars, which would be deposited in Wall Street and other international banks. In 2001, dissatisfied with the shrinking value of the dollars that OPEC was getting for its oil, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein broke the pact and sold oil in euros. Regime change swiftly followed, accompanied by widespread destruction of the country. In Libya, Qaddafi also broke the pact; but he did more than just sell his oil in another currency. As these developments are detailed by Denise Ryne “For decades, Libya and other African countries had been attempting to create a pan-African gold standard. Libya’s Qaddafi and other heads of African States had wanted an independent, pan-African, “hard currency.” Under al-Qaddafi’s leadership, African nations had convened at least twice for monetary unification plans.
The countries discussed the possibility of using the Libyan dinar and the silver dirham as the only possible money to buy African oil. Until the recent US/NATO invasion, the gold dinar was issued by the Central Bank of Libya (CBL). The Libyan bank was 100% state-owned and independent. Foreigners had to go through the CBL to do business with Libya.
The CBL issued the dinar, using the country’s 143.8 tons of gold. Libya’s Qaddafi conceived and financed a plan to unify the sovereign States of Africa with one gold currency. In 2004, a pan-African Parliament laid plans for the African Economic Community – with a single gold currency by 2023. African oil-producing nations were planning to abandon the petro-dollar, and demand gold payment for oil/gas. Qaddafi had done more than organise an African monetary coup. He had demonstrated that financial independence could be achieved.
His greatest infrastructure project, the Great Man-made River, was turning arid regions into a breadbasket for Libya. That could explain why this critical piece of infrastructure was destroyed in 2011. The goal of US military intervention was to disrupt an emerging pattern of independence and a network of collaboration within Africa that would facilitate increased African self-reliance. This is at odds with the geostrategic and political economic ambitions of extra-continental European powers, namely the US. Whether salvaging central banking and the corrupt global monetary system were truly among the reasons for Gaddafi’s overthrow may never be known for certain – at least not publicly. There, the matter would have remained suspicious but unverified like so many stories of fraud and corruption, but for the publication of Hillary Clinton’s emails after an FBI probe. They add substantial weight to Newman’s suspicions: violent intervention was not chiefly about the security of the people. It was about the security of global banking, money and oil.
Solly Rakgomo is a graduate student of Politics and International Relations.