Britain sold its soul to Libya
March 04, 2011 4:45:40 AM
Premen Addy
Muammar Gaddafi used money to buy influence with the British establishment whose leading members stand compromised.
It never rains but it pours as the convulsions in north Africa and West Asia surely become the epitaph of Anglo-American statecraft in the Arab world. What began as a ‘little local difficulty’ in Tunisia is now a raging firestorm. Having
swept away Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the autocratic ruler of Tunisia, and the Hosni Mubarak regime in Egypt, it threatens the fragile stability of the Bedouin encampment of Saudi Arabia and haunts the Persian Gulf sheikhs and Jordan’s besieged Hashemite dynasty. Libya occupies centre stage.
Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s desert kingdom is seven times the size of the United Kingdom and is twelfth in the table of oil-producing states, the bulk of its exports destined for Europe. The country’s current plight is deepening anxiety in London and Washington, DC, not the least because the reduced volume of Libyan oil has led to an exponential rise in oil prices on the world market.
If unchecked, this spike in oil prices could set back American economic recovery most of all.
The US and the UK are contemplating a ‘No Fly Zone’ over Libya on the lines of that imposed on Saddam Hussain’s Iraq after the first Gulf War. Could this be first step to a wider Anglo-American war on Libya? Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad.
Col Gaddafi, a narcissist tyrant, has been in power for 41 years. Sitting atop a largely tribal society, he has played off the tribes in time-honoured fashion. There has been
no visible political or economic progress in Libya, merely an accumulation of petro dollars, principally for personal and family use and the distribution of patronage. But all good things come to their appointed end.
The violence and scale of the Libyan insurrection has surprised most pundits.
The Libyan opposition has disarmed significant numbers of the loyalist Gaddafi forces and administers large swathes of territory. The Colonel, holed up in the capital city of Tripoli, rants and raves, his incoherence pointing to diminishing sanity.
Arab Nero or Caligula? You can take your pick.
Col Gaddafi has been out in the cold for decades because of his propensity to fund and arm insurgencies against the West, which also included acts of terrorism. The most infamous was the bombing of an American passenger aircraft over the Scottish town of Lockerbie with the loss of 279 lives on board. He rethought his position following the US occupation of Iraq and the capture and execution of Saddam Hussein.
The Libyan leader sundered plans to produce weapons of mass destruction to America’s satisfaction. His rehabilitation as a ‘moderate’ was promptly set in motion. Oil deals were struck and high profile Western visitors came calling, British Prime Minister Tony Blair prominent among them. This chapter is a tale in itself but space demands that primacy be given to the more titillating script doing the rounds for the delectation of the British public.
The story involves Col Gaddafi’s heir apparent, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, who was admitted as a PhD student in 2005 by the famed London School of Economics. The prior visit to Libya of the then LSE director, Professor Anthony Giddens, a Blair mentor as it happens, and his praise of the country and its mercurial supremo, smoothed Gaddafi junior’s flawed rite of passage.
Lord Megnad Desai, currently deep in the enjoyment of Goa’s hotpots, oversaw the transaction and was an external examiner of the doctoral dissertation which, it is claimed by London broadsheets and tabloids, his lordship hadn’t read with the care required, assuming he had read it at all.
Saif Gaddafi’s English, judging by his brief television performances, would get him through a shopping expedition to a Tesco supermarket, it would be an insuperable obstacle to a doctoral degree.
BBC television’s Newsnight programme sent an expert reporter to ferret out the truth. He discovered that the Gaddafi clan had hired a London consultancy firm called Monitor to promote the dear leader and his works through articles in the Press; also by arranging visits to Libya by the great and good adept at spinning a tidy yarn without breaking sweat.
It was suggested that the self-same Monitor arranged for parts of the Gaddafi thesis to be penned by another hand. Saif Gaddafi was duly awarded his doctorate in 2008, with the LSE enriched by a Gaddafi-sponsored Libyan bequest of £1.5 million. The LSE is to set up an inquiry into the sorry affair.
Prof Desai’s ermine robes, already soiled by his support of General Pervez Musharraf, may soon be on their way for thorough washing in public.
The deeper concern is the penetration of Arab and Muslim money into the bowers of British academe. A Tory MP, Mr Rob Halfon, has charged that Liverpool’s John Moores University as well as the London School of Economics had been “prostituting themselves” to the regime behind the Lockerbie massacre. The House of Commons Library, which has compiled a list of West Asian donors to British universities, referred to a report by the Centre for Social Cohesion estimating that £75 million had been donated to the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies by 12 Muslim countries, including Malaysia, Turkey, Yemen, the United Arab Emirates and Brunei. Other large gifts included £8 million by a Saudi prince for an Islamic centre at the University of Edinburgh.
Mr Anthony Glees, the director of the Centre for Security and Intelligence Studies at Buckingham University, said: “There needs to be a proper inquiry into the funding of British higher education by Arab and Islamic states whose records on human rights are appalling. Our universities have sacrificed their basic ethical values in the pursuit of money.”
Why blame British universities when the British establishment as a whole is at fault? Establishment — the word first used by Anthony Sampson in his 1962 work Anatomy of Britain — denotes the seamless robe of influence and power and patronage and its extension to every layer of a dominant authority, whether it be in Whitehall, the Palace of Westminster, the theatre, the arts, the universities (MI5 and MI6 recruit the most promising Oxbridge graduates with the close co-operation of the heads of colleges), or the media and other exploitable points on the compass. It is a mutation of the corporate state at work.
The caricature of Muammar Gaddafi that appears with this article is courtesy Sharrock’s Blog.
