Alright, y'all, welcome back.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm gonna wrap up the show today.
I was able to get a hold of David Enders.
Off the Baghdad Bulletin now, writing for McClatchy Newspapers.
Welcome back to the show, David.
Hi, thanks for having me.
So, the original reason that I tried to get a hold of you earlier in the week, I didn't realize you were in Iraq.
I thought you were back in America from your stint reporting in Libya, which I'd read a little bit about.
I have here one article for McClatchy.
A reporter in Libya wonders about lessons of war.
It's kind of an overview of the time that you spent there, and I was wondering if you could give us the lowdown, starting with when exactly you were there, how much of this revolution, so-called, you witnessed.
So, I was there for about a month, from the end of August until about the end of September.
I was there sort of as Tripoli was falling.
I came into the country from Tunisia.
And so, pretty much to the point where Tripoli, from the point where Tripoli fell until the level of allaying siege to Sirte, and Bani Walid, two of the last major urban areas that are holding out for Gaddafi.
Well, and so, what do you know that we should know?
Well, the piece that you mentioned, I guess, we'll start with that, kind of tackles this idea, I guess, that this has been a very good war.
I think the general sort of meme in the media is that, you know, you have this revolution against this crazy dictator, and there's no doubt Omar Gaddafi is nearly unparalleled, and Libya was a police state.
And people rose up because of the lack of political freedom and the repression that occurred under Gaddafi's government.
So, what I saw was, you know, the covering of this fighting, I think, very pro-rebel, and that's not surprising.
I mean, obviously, the Gaddafi guys weren't talking to the international press or inviting them along, especially once the government fell.
But what I was seeing was that there were a lot of things being missed.
I mean, in a situation like this, you know, it was kind of coming off as this very clean revolution, and I think that that was sort of a misnomer.
And it was, you know, backed by NATO and seemed very, you know, a positive thing.
And my experience has been that usually nothing is quite that cut and dry.
The rebels are, you know, committing more crimes, torturing, potentially engaged in extrajudicial killing.
So I tried to focus my reporting.
Most reporters were at the front with the rebels covering the fighting, and so I tried to focus on other things that were going on.
Including racial cleansing, the gross mistreatment.
Libya is a country that...
There are 6 million Libyans, and prior to the revolution, there were perhaps as many as 2 million foreign African workers in the country.
I mean, it's a state that has a lot of oil.
So there were a number of domestic workers there.
And there is quite a bit of...
There was quite a bit of pre-existing racism that manifested itself violently as the government fell.
And there were these accusations, and in some cases, true, Gaddafi did employ Africans from other countries as militiamen, as fighters.
There are many black Libyans.
You could also say non-Arab Libyans.
And so they were being treated as all supporting Gaddafi in many ways.
There were, of course, instances of Arab Libyans protecting black Libyans from retribution.
But as the prisons, the rebels' prisons filled, they were being filled, it seems, very intimately with black Libyans.
And in some cases, these foreign African workers.
So there was perhaps not as clean as one would want to believe or hope.
And then, of course, what we're seeing now, and it was starting to happen while I was there, is that the rebels are starting to fight amongst themselves now that the government has fallen.
And the cause that united everyone is no longer exactly the cause.
People are starting to fight over the spoils of war.
And there is certainly the chance that the civil war that exists will become a civil war with many more factions.
It won't just be pro- or anti-Gaddafi.
It's going to be a whole bunch of different groups, tribal, potentially political or religious groups fighting one another.
All right, now there's a lot to go over there.
First, I wanted to ask you about the size of the rebel force.
I talked with, well, I guess they're not the rebels anymore, the NATO Terror Council or Command or something.
These guys, I talked with Patrick Coburn during, say, I don't know, the middle of the fighting or something.
And he was saying a lot of times the press outnumbers the guys fighting at the front.
I think the New Yorker reported that maybe there was a thousand guys anyway.
Yeah, yeah, there would have been no revolution without NATO.
It would have been over months ago.
But the numbers are really that small.
Well, potentially.
I spent maybe four or five days at the front and decided because I wanted to understand how the fighting was working and what we were looking at.
And, yeah, I mean, there was a moment where I said, wow, if they signed up the journalists who were here to fight, they'd double their numbers.
And, I mean, they are very spread out.
It's hard to sort of get a sense exactly of how many there are.
But, yes, at any given time, it's certainly possible there aren't more than a thousand men at arms.
I mean, people take turns going to the front.
I mean, I would think the actual number of people who have fought or are fighting is larger than that.
But it's perhaps not, from watching the television news, a force that you might think it is.
I guess I'm surprised that even with NATO air power, these guys were able to be as, quote-unquote, victorious as they have been thus far.
Well, I don't know that.
And I don't know exactly what place Coburn was talking about.
I think in some areas there are certainly men.
And Libya is a massive, massive country.
So it is hard, you know, just because there are, you know, I don't know, I think a thousand is probably low.
I think it's quite a bit more than that.
And I think it increases at times of heavy fighting.
But, no, it is not, I would say, a particularly large force.
And you see it, I mean, just in the number of, excuse me, when they entered Tripoli, everyone was talking about all of these weapons that were dispensed, weapons storehouses that were unguarded.
And then you really had a sense of how small the force was.
They just didn't have the force to protect all these areas or to station men there.
I think it's also important to sort of get a sense of, it's very ad hoc and disorganized.
I mean, you say, hey, who's in charge?
And everyone's in charge.
And I don't know if Patrick spoke about this, but there's also just, I think, a crisis of legitimacy that we're beginning to see emerge.
Well, it sounds like it.
I mean, if they only have however many, a few thousand, it sounds like clearly less than 10,000 actual fighters or whatever.
They can't possibly be all that representative.
And, of course, we've learned about Hakeem Belhaj and the CIA guys, Hifter and all these people trying to take over.
It doesn't sound like the people, we the people of Libya at all.
But in the short time we have left here, David, I wanted to ask you about this very important article, which if I remember right, I think I read in its entirety on the air here a few weeks back.
African women say rebels raped them in Libyan camp.
It seems pretty clear from this article that you're standing there in this camp interviewing these women about the nightly rape raids.
Yeah, that was the case, and that was confirmed by some foreign medical staff who were present there.
And, yeah, that's one example of attacks or, you know, persecution or crimes against black Africans and black Libyans that have been occurring.
And this was, of course, part of how they got us into the war.
Part of the war propaganda from Susan Rice at the United Nations was that Gaddafi was feeding all of his mercenary forces with Viagra pills and throwing them out on a mass rape campaign that we had to stop.
Yes, and some of those claims were clearly disproven.
There's been a lot of propaganda on both sides, but I think the NTC has proven that its statements are in many cases no less or no more believable than things Gaddafi said.
Hearing it again and again, it's the final battle for this city.
That's happening.
I mean, in Tripoli, when they entered, it was very tough to figure out what was going on and who was in charge.
And they were making these...
You know, I think maybe it was the second or third day in Tripoli, after it had fallen, I called up the man who was supposed to be the Justice Minister.
And he said, oh, yeah, the courts...
You know, he said, well, you've got this many prisoners.
What are you going to do?
You've taken thousands of prisoners.
What are you going to do with them?
And he said, oh, the courts will be working in two days.
We'll be in the Ministry of Justice.
Come visit me.
And it was a patently absurd statement, given the situation.
And, you know, two days later, the courts...
You know, none of the judges had come back to him.
None of this.
But it kind of amazed me that knowing he was talking to a foreign journalist, he was willing to make such an absurd statement.
Because the NTC obviously has a sense of, you know, meeting, obviously, with NATO backing, meeting international support.
And it was kind of shocking to me how quickly people were saying things that were just so easily disproven and so incredibly wrong.
And I think that's a real signal right there that we might be in for some problems there.
Yeah, well, Amnesty International is reporting today that detainees are subject to virtually daily beatings there.
And it's admitted, yeah, we beat them until they confessed, they said, the NTC guys.
Right, well, I guess the thing about Libya, which is maybe something we've learned from Iraq and from other places, is that when you overthrow a political system like this, what you find is that the people overthrowing it, if they have no other political experience or experience in dealing with these matters, they tend to...
I mean, we're seeing it here in Iraq now.
I mean, I was not in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, but everything that I've understood about it, you know, people are simply referring to Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister, as the Shiite Saddam.
And we're seeing, you know, opposition being dealt with the same way as it was under Saddam.
Egypt is a military dictatorship and police state that, you know, the figurehead of state has fallen, but that still remains, you know, dealing with opposition and dealing with dissent in the same way.
And so the idea that these people in Libya, having no other political experience, were suddenly going to become, you know, people who were committed to human rights and the rule of law, or were going to necessarily be treating people very much differently than the way they were treated, I mean, part of it is the logic of violence and the cycle of violence.
So this idea that this was kind of a, you know, you want to believe that it's a clean, happy, good revolution, but the human nature, and I guess the nature of these things, tends to dictate otherwise, and I think we're just seeing evidence of that.
And I mean, in some of the prisons I visited, I did visit one prison, and that's not to say it's across the board.
There was one prison in Misrata that I visited that was very, very well run, and people were being taken care of, and they were not being abused.
However, they bore some serious evidence of abuse at the hands of the people who had brought them to the prison, who had arrested them.
And to the credit of the men running this particular prison, they did not even attempt to hide it.
They allowed us to speak with the prisoners.
There were doctors from Doctors Without Borders present in the prison.
I mean, you do, of course, find examples of people who are, you know, essentially good people, who are treating people well and who are trying to do what they feel is right, but you also have a situation where people are not constrained and where they're able to express all sorts of prejudices and pre-existing views violently, and that's very much present as well.
And what will really remain to be seen as far as how different the rebels are from the regime they've deposed is when they do finish off these last cities that are holding out Bonnie Williams' search and what they will do with the people who are presumably the people who are closest to the regime, who are still fighting because they don't believe for a second they're going to, you know, be put on trial or be treated well when they're captured.
Right, well, you know, Alan Bach used to quote, I think, Aldous Huxley, saying that, hey, violent and destructive means determine violent and destructive ends, and I'm cynical enough that I don't really think that anybody really wants to build any kind of fairness in law and democracy there.
The Western powers are just exploiting the North Africans like they always have been, and whatever, without end as far as that goes.
But, you know, it's worth mentioning, as you say, how that's, at least so far, doesn't seem to be working out because that's the excuse that they always use, is that America's Superman here and we never have our own interests at heart or even those of our friends necessarily, not at the expense of justice and righteousness, and so we're only here to help the little guy and protect them from the bad guys.
And meanwhile, you know, Barack Obama and his administration are apparently indifferent, completely, at best, to the widespread torture and rape and, you know, clan-like roundups going on in Libya, you know, at the hands of their sock puppets.
They don't really care, they just are there to steal stuff.
Seems like.
Well, yeah, there's lots of...
How's that for a question?
How's that for a question?
There are lots of repressive dictatorships we could bomb.
We tend to bomb the ones with natural resources that we're interested in.
I think that's fair to say.
Yeah, and that's what Putin doesn't like, and that the Saudis don't like.
The Qataris as well.
I mean, it's very interesting, the role of Qatar in Libya at the moment, backing the rebels and just, you know, the amount of weaponry that's poured in, and there will be blowback, as there often is.
Already these weapons are popping up in Gaza, going through Egypt, going to Gaza.
So, you know, it'll be interesting to see how Israel feels about all this.
Yeah, well, we haven't even talked about the supposedly at least 10,000 missing weapons, the bulk of which supposedly are shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles.
Yeah, I mean, the rebels were so loose with the weaponry at one point, I actually could have...
It was quite frightening.
You could have grabbed some yourself.
I could have loaded brand-new anti-tank rockets into my car and drove away.
I mean, they were sitting in...
I mean, they were literally like brand-new stuff was sitting in the parking garage across from the hotel we were staying at, which had been commandeered by the rebels, and just literally totally unsecured.
I mean, I could have actually just loaded up the trunk with very expensive, brand-new, sophisticated, dangerous weaponry and rolled away.
So, Lord knows what's happened to some of it.
When you can do that as a journalist passing through, that's a bad, bad thing.
Yeah, I would say so.
Listen, we're way over time, and it's expensive as hell to call Iraq.
I better let you go, but I really appreciate your time.
Stay safe over there, David.
Anytime, anytime.
Thank you.
David Enders, everybody.
McClatchy Newspapers.
Baghdad Bulletin is the book available at your local book-selling website.
