When Passivity Is Complicity

Before the passivity of the democratic rulers of the world, particularly the United States and Europe, the genocidal dictator of Libya, Moammar Gadhafi, continues to bomb with impunity the population of his country heroically fighting for liberty and democracy, killing and wounding many people, and causing immense material destruction.

Spokespersons of the United States, the European Union, the North Atlantic Trade Organization and the Arab League declare each day that they are worried about the situation in Libya, and that they tirelessly discuss possible measures they could apply to help the people of that country. But they do nothing to bring a halt to Gadhafi’s genocide.

This is not the first time the so-called international community has behaved in this way. The current situation in Libya is very similar to that of Spain in 1937, when the air force of Adolf Hitler bombed the republican Spanish population. From the Nazi bombings against Spain remains the Guernica painting by Pablo Picasso, exhibited in the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid and known throughout the world thanks to its innumerable reproductions, for future generations [to see]. It is a breathtaking testimony and a dramatic call to never again allow barbaric crimes of that nature to take place.

Guernica, a population of the Basque country of Spain, was destroyed mercilessly by the Nazi air force that supported the Franco military uprising against the republic. Through the celebrated painting by Picasso, Guernica remains a symbol of the mortality and destruction caused by bombings ordered by insane tyrants against defenseless civilian populations. And in that tragic occasion, the Spanish republicans also clamored for international help to halt the Nazi genocide, but no democratic government came to their defense.

We can also mention, by way of example, the case of Hungary in 1956, when the demolishing tanks of the now extinct Soviet Union bloodily crushed the anti-communist rebellion of the Hungarian people before the indifference and complicit passivity of the democratic governments that are pompously called “the free world.”

In the current case of Libya, which is literally dripping blood, it is important to recognize that Europe and the United States have already put sanctions on the Gadhafi government. But the policies are bland and insufficient. They have applied commercial restrictions to Gadhafi; they have frozen outside funds; they have prohibited — along with their neighboring countries — entrance into the majority of democratic countries; they have imposed an arms embargo; they have initiated an investigation to organize a possible international process for crimes against humanity and war crimes; and the European Union has recognized the makeshift provisional rebel government. But an abnormal dictator like Gadhafi cannot be stopped or overthrown with diplomatic or economic sanctions, nor with judicial threats, but rather with the last resort that he understands, which is military force.

And the truth is that foreign invasion is not necessary to overthrow Gadhafi. There has been a proposal to aid the insurgent Libyan population with a supply of armaments, but that is allegedly not possible because of the arms embargo in Libya, determined by the U.N., [which] not only [applies] to the government but also to the rebels. There has been talk of imposing a no-fly zone to impede the Russian (Sujay) and French (Mirage) planes of Gadhafi, as well as the M.I. helicopters, also Russian, which continue bombing and massacring the Libyan people. But it has been said that this measure would have to be approved by the U.N. Security Council, which would be impossible given the vetoes of Russia and China, whose governments are friends with any dictator that exists in any part of the world.

What is certain is that, if they wanted to, the United States, Europe and NATO (which is practically made up of only democratic governments) could impose a no-fly zone in spite of the vetoes of Russia and China, which is what they did in 1991 in Iraq to protect the Kurdish population that was bombed by Saddam Hussein’s air force.

But the governments of Europe and the United States are not even willing to do that in order to stop the bombings in Libya and help [the people] win their freedom. And with that attitude they become accomplices of Gadhafi, because in these matters, passivity is complicity.