Beyond Japan and Lybia

BEYOND JAPAN AND LYBIA:

MUSLIM WOMEN AND SAUDI WAHABISM

By Mon González

In my opinion, the West is turning a blind eye on something to do with the Mediterranean for the third time in the last twenty years. In 1991, we turned a blind eye when we didn’t want to acknowledge the political victory of the Algerian Islamist party, the FIS, in the free and fair elections held then, two years after Chadli Benyedid had brought multipartidism back to that country. In 2006 the West did acknowledge that Hamas had won free and fair elections in Palestine, but the Government that came out of those elections was headbutted from the start. Through both actions, tens of thousands of people have died in the Mediterranean in the last twenty years.

Now the Mediterranean is facing, through what is happening in Lybia, its third main challenge in the last twenty years. But this time it is very different. Why? Because we don’t live anymore –thank goodness!- in a partitioned world, but in an interrelated one.

First, I think we, as citizens of an interrelated world, should be coherent with the fact that interrelation should once and for all start implying interdependence. And instead of listening to the news and just observing the tragedy in Japan (15,000 deaths and 500,000 refugees), we should be coherent and concentrate world efforts, not in bombing right now Lybia, but in helping out the Japanese population –blessed population!-, which although lives in the world’s second most powerful economy is suffering an unprecedented tragedy.  Don’t forget Japan experienced a similar natural disaster fifteen years ago (which at the time caused 6.000 deaths) and no one helped them out. Lest we forget!

Second, because that interdependence should once and for all start implying truthfulness and openness, otherwise we will need to continue building every day growing fake scenarios, on the top of the real tragedies we already experience, to be able to cover the world’s political lies or the economic vested interests that underpin some political decisions.

And now in this interrelated world we don’t only have the media bringing us instant coverage, which, like in the past, could, if vested interests were strong enough, be manipulated, but we have now independent sources of information, from the ordinary people, from the streets, and it is much more difficult for all those people to agree at a certain point to tell us the same lie, and therefore there are much greater possibilities that truth will end up permeating at the end.

Taking open sources into account, we can interpret the Lybian conflict in a very different was as we are doing until present. On 11 February 2011 Mubarak left power in Egypt. That day, the wahabi ballast that underpinned it, started sending its thugs towards the West [as it had done in the nineties, when once the adventure against the Russian enemy had finished in Afganistan, the wahabis had created the Lybian Islamist Front, which Gadafi fought and thank goodness Gadafi defeated, otherwise we would have nowadays another Afganistan in Lybia]. Those thugs regrouped around Bengasi between the 15 and the 17 of February. After that the Lybian regime [the only panarabist regime that has managed to survive since the second wave of Arab revolutions in the fifties and sixties] started to ask foreigners to leave the country: China for example hired huge planes and took his approximately 30.000 workers out of Libya in a week. But the economic vested interests of the West started being affected by that and subsequently big pressure to take Gaddafi out of the way started. But as those interest are not alone any more in ruling the world, the mandate that ensued, UNSC Resolution 1973 was very balanced, as it allowed a no-fly zone (NFZ) to protect civilians [which although they tell us civilians are trapped only under Gaddafi’s bombs, the truth is, from the additional sources of information one can access now, that they are trapped under the crossed fire of the rebels infiltrated from Egypt and the Libyan troops], but not the indiscriminate use of force to remove Gaddafi. It was a resolution that consecrated and articulated something that has taken us a lot of effort to put pen to paper as a human race: the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). And the resolution also consecrated international mediation, among others, of the African Union. And they have been trying their best.

Thirdly, beyond the two crossroads I have already mentioned (helping out Japan vs. bombing right now Lybia and truthfulness vs. security and vested interests), the situation this time is different because we also find ourselves at a very fundamental crossroads that stretches far beyond the Lybian regime, and can offer a very important opportunity in terms of women’s rights in the world. How and why?

The third fundamental crossroads at which we are now is: do we want to allow the male-dominated feudal systems to continue to prevail in the Arab and Muslim worlds [and the sheer toppling of Gaddafi, goes in that direction], that is, do we want to allow uxoricides and honour crimes to continue to remain unpunished by Penal Codes which just ignore the fact that those are real crimes and simply don’t punish them; or are we going to be brave enough; seize this historic opportunity; go to the root cause of the Arab and Muslim injustices against women; tackle them profoundly and with a true sense of responsibility; and help out in the process of liberating those women, and hence their daughters? And it is the Saudi Sunni wahabist monarchy and the Iranian Shi’ia ayatolahi republic we need to face, both, not only one of them, if the process of liberating the Arab and Muslim women is to be a reality one day.

See my webpage: http://www.mongonzalez.es/