Doling Out Spoils Of Libyan War – OpEd

By Hassan Hanizadeh

The meeting of the heads and representatives of 63 different states in Paris, which was aimed at discussing the Libyan crisis, has turned into eth scene of a turf war over the manner of distributing the country’s wealth.

France, which since its dark age of colonial rule over Africa has constantly seen the continent as its backyard, received the lion’s share.

Based on a contract between France and Libya’s Transitional National Council (TNC), Paris arrogated 35 percent of Libya’s oil exports to itself. As Libya accounts for 3.5 percent of the world’s oil exports, this portion appears to be the biggest slice of the ‘Libyan cake.’

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who played an utterly destructive role in Libya’s recent developments, basically owes his win in France’s March 2007 elections to the financial assistance of fugitive dictator Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.

Gaddafi contacted Sarkozy through his son Saif al-Islam at that time as a means of defusing Libya’s domestic crisis and rebuilding the country’s relations with the international community.

France’s current head of state, who is a Polish Jewish migrant, managed to get ahead of his competition and enter the Elys?e Palace thanks to the Gaddafi’s large financial contribution.

From then until the recent unrest in Libya, the two were in either direct or indirect contact. Sarkozy, however, never found it necessary to encourage Gaddafi to establish democracy in the country.

After the eruption of the domestic conflict in Libya, the French president buckled under domestic and international pressure, siding with Libyan revolutionaries to act against his former ally.

The about-face was meant to help Sarkozy win the 2012 elections. He took promotional advantage of the Libyan crisis and held the Paris conference.

It was agreed in the summit that USD 15 billion of Gaddafi’s frozen assets would be unblocked and given to the TNC. The measure could only be seen as an attempt by Sarkozy to bring himself closer to the council, given that he has already prematurely started campaigning for the presidential race.

Essentially, Sarkozy’s unbalanced policies and his unconditional way of following the US political courses of action has placed France in absolute political isolation.

France’s head of state used the country’s capacities to boost the Zionist lobby, ignoring the country’s influential role in resolving the international crises.

Sarkozy, unlike Former President Jacques Chirac, not only failed to promote France’s position in the European Union and the Middle East, but also undermined the country’s superiority through getting involved in nonessential issues.

In the Egyptian and Tunisian developments, French policymakers acted against the will and demands of the two countries; so much so that France lost the traditional respect it commanded among the Egyptian and Tunisian nations.

Sarkozy, more than seeking to restore the standing of France among the North African and Middle Eastern countries, is only after personal profiteering from regional developments for his electoral objectives.

During the “Friends of Libya” summit in Paris, Nicolas Sarkozy tried to exploit the meeting to benefit his own election campaign.

He thus announced that the NATO forces would linger in Libya until the termination of the critical conditions in this country.

France aims to fully dominate the oil resources in the east of Libya and convince the country to give the biggest share to French companies for the reconstruction of its destructions.

The “Friends of Libya” conference in Paris was held based on colonial ambitions to plunder the country’s national assets rather than to provide aid to the Libyan nation.

The reports of Arab media show that France, Britain and the US have hatched a joint plot to replicate Iraq after the fall of Saddam Husain in March 2003 in Libya.

The three countries aim to leave the fugitive Libyan dictator free so that a daunting security atmosphere can be created in Libyan society so that they might exert pressure on the Libyan nation and National Transitional Council and further blackmail them.

NATO, the US, France, and Britain are surely privy to the hideout of the fallen dictator of Libya, but porously refuse to kill or arrest him.

NATO’s purpose is to leave Colonel Gaddafi free to make the Libyan social climate insecure, so that they might force the Libyan nation into making greater political and economic concessions.

Thus, more than casting an exclusively humanitarian and moral glance upon Libyan developments, Nikolas Sarkozy intends to exploit the recent developments in this country in line with asserting his election interests.

Though Nikolas Sarkozy might once again triumph in the upcoming presidential elections with the aid of the Jewish lobby, this victory will no doubt relegate the standing of France as an influential European country.