by PATRICK BOND
The late poet-activist Dennis Brutus occasionally used ‘Seattle’, the name of a city in the northwestern United States, as a verb. We should ‘seattle Copenhagen’, he said in late 2009, to prevent the North from doing a climate deal in their interests, against Africa’s.
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Libya is the ripest regime to fall, but London’s generous military aid and the support of politicians like former Prime Minister Tony Blair, oil company BP, arms-deal facilitator Prince Andrew and London School of Economics (LSE) intellectuals seem to have emboldened Muammar Gaddafi and his family, leaving open the question of how many more hundreds – or thousands – the lunatic will kill on his way down.
Gaddafi may try to hang on, with his small band of loyalists allegedly bolstered by sub-Saharan African mercenaries – potentially including Zimbabweans, according to Harare media – helping Gaddafi for a $16,000 payoff each. After Gaddafi zigzagged to a pro-Western stance in 2004 by demobilizing weapons of mass destruction in exchange for closure on the PanAm 007 airline bombing and subsequent sanctions, some millions of the family’s ill-gotten wealth were showered on the academic crowd most favoured by Blair.
Blair’s ‘Third Way’ political advisor, former London School of Economics Director Lord Anthony Giddens, visited the Libyan dictator in 2007, pronouncing, “As one-party states go, Libya is not especially repressive. Gaddafi seems genuinely popular… Will real progress be possible only when Gaddafi leaves the scene? I tend to think the opposite. If he is sincere in wanting change, as I think he is, he could play a role in muting conflict that might otherwise arise as modernisation takes hold.”
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