NATO ‘humanitarian’ warriors let refugees from Libya die

This March 2016 video is called Libya 5 years after NATO intervention: From one of the richest nations in Africa to most troubled.

About Libya in 2011:

Civilian casualties have raised serious misgivings about NATO intervention in Libya, even among supporters of the ongoing aerial campaign. And while the international community is taking sides in the conflict, it is the Libyan people who suffer most.

By Patrick Martin:

Charges mount of NATO war crimes in Libya

6 August 2011

The Italian government has demanded an investigation into whether a NATO warship engaged in the war against Libya ignored the plight of a boatload of refugees, contributing to the deaths of as many as 100 people from hunger and thirst.

The vessel arrived at Lampedusa, an Italian island in the Mediterranean Sea between Sicily and Libya, with 270 survivors crammed onto a 65-foot-long boat. The boat had issued an SOS after its engine broke down, but an unidentified NATO warship ignored the appeal.

The survivors said the bodies of the dead had been thrown into the sea during the harrowing journey. They said they had first encountered a Cypriot tugboat, which gave them life rafts and notified Italian authorities.

Italy informed NATO, which had a warship 27 miles away, but the warship’s assistance was denied. The refugee boat was finally reached by Italian coastguard vessels and a helicopter when it was 90 miles south of Lampedusa.

The International Organization for Migration said the vessel had left the Libyan coast near Tripoli on Saturday, jammed with African migrants from Nigeria, Ghana, Ethiopia, Sudan, Chad and Morocco, and lacking water and food.

Italian foreign minister Franco Frattini requested a formal investigation of the incident and instructed his country’s ambassador to NATO to raise the issue of rescue of civilian refugees as part of the NATO mission in the war.

NATO officials denied they had received an appeal to save the refugee vessel. A spokeswoman said that Italian authorities had told NATO about the ship while saying they were responding to the distress call themselves. “NATO subsequently confirmed with Italian authorities that they had responded to the incident with three ships as well as with helicopter support,” the official said.

A right-wing Italian MP, Roberto Castelli, denounced NATO claims that its fleet did not know the refugee boat was in the maritime war zone. “The idea that NATO, with all its surveillance technology, was not aware of a boat of this size is a story that not even Little Red Riding Hood would believe,” he said.

The war was launched by the United States, France and Britain on the pretext of defending civilians from the regime of Muammar Gaddafi, but NATO warplanes have routinely bombed civilians, both in Gaddafi-held territory and even in the areas held by the NATO-backed “rebels.”

At the same time, in the Mediterranean, thousands of refugees fleeing the war zone are persecuted by the NATO powers, just as they were before the war.

In another atrocity case, the International News Safety Institute asked UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to investigate the NATO bombing of the headquarters of Libyan state television, in which three people were reported killed and 15 injured. The INSI asked the UN leader to determine whether the attack was a breach of a 2006 Security Council resolution that bans attacks on journalists.

The International Federation of Journalists has also condemned the July 30 bombing raid, which destroyed three satellite transmission dishes.

NATO’s five-month bombing campaign in Libya, run under the guise of protecting civilians, is also killing victims fleeing the conflict, directly and indirectly: here.

Bosnia, Kosovo, and Now Libya: The Human Costs of Washington’s Ongoing Collusion With Terrorists. Peter Dale Scott, Japan Focus: “Twice in the last two decades, significant cuts in U.S. and western military spending were foreseen: first after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and then in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. But both times military spending soon increased, and among the factors contributing to the increase were America’s interventions in new areas: the Balkans in the 1990s, and Libya today. Hidden from public view in both cases was the extent to which al-Qaeda was a covert U.S. ally in both interventions, rather than its foe”: here.

Britain: Can anyone explain why, at a time of national financial hardships and budgetry cutbacks, we can afford the hundreds of millions of pounds we’re spending on yet another imperial adventure in Libya?

Reports circulated on June 15, 2011 that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) would not rule out bombing ancient Roman ruins in Libya if it knew Muammar Gaddafi’s soldiers were hiding military equipment in them. For those who appreciate the importance of Libya’s Roman archeological sites, the most well preserved in all the Mediterranean, this is worrying news: here.

NATO Missiles Target Libyan Hospital, Kill 50 Children: here. NATO said to have killed 85 civilians: here.

Bombs continued to fall on Tripoli today as Nato continued its mission to oust Colonel Muammar Gadaffi despite its member states’ economic crises and confusion over the leadership of its National Transitional Council (NTC) allies: here.

Nic Beuret writes on the economic and political pressures behind border controls and the EU’s ‘Fortress Europe’ anti-migrant measures: here.