Belgian Prince Laurent, Berlusconi, and Libya war hypocrisy

Belgian Prince Laurent is now in trouble for his contacts with Libyan anti-Gadaffiists, contacts independent of the Belgian government.

Though Prince Laurent behaves as a maverick and many Belgian politicians do not like that, on Libya his politics are pretty much parallel to the official politics of Belgium and other Western countries’ ruling classes. As Laurent used to be a buddy of the Gadaffi family until recently; like Tony Blair, Berlusconi, etc. Now that Gadaffi has proved incapable of crushing opposition swiftly, thus “restoring order” for western oil and other multinational corporations, ex-friends of Gadaffi suddenly magically transform themselves into “friends of the revolt”.

The Berlusconi regime in Italy used to be particularly close to Gadaffi. Even in the first days after the anti-Gadaffi revolt had begun. A Libyan oppositionist then on Dutch TV accused Berlusconi of having Italian warplanes bomb Libyan cities to help Gadaffi. When Gadaffi said his opponents were supposedly all “Al Qaeda”, the Berlusconi government seconded Gadaffi in this accusation, adding its own Islamophobic xenophobic twist to it.

By now, Berlusconi’s Italy is the main base for NATO planes bombing Libya. After Sarkozy’s France and the absolute oil dealing monarchy of Qatar, Berlusconi’s Italy became the third foreign government to recognize the anti-Gadaffi administration in Benghazi. Berlusconi said he was so busy waging war on Libya that he could not attend his trial on sex with a child prostitute. Berlusconi surely did not want to lose out in the bloody redistribution of Libyan oil spoils.

Berlusconi’s ‘indecent’ game terrified teenage guests: here.