EXPATRIATES DISPLACED BY LIBYA CONFLICT NEED AID

EXPATRIATES DISPLACED BY LIBYA CONFLICT NEED AID

Erle Frayne D. Argonza

Too many expatriate workers are helping to build the Libyan economy and society to bring it closer to modernity. They comprise over 1/3 of the Libyan population of 6 Million+, and they include thousands of my fellow Filipinos. With the conflict between pro and anti-Kadhafy forces escalating, expats were so badly displaced along the way.

I hope I could have been interviewed by Kadhafy himself before the turmoil started. For I would candidly recommend to him to simply absorb en toto the expatriate workers in Libyan society and let them be a constitutive part of the population there. They have already enriched Libyan life in no small measures, so there’s no reason why they should be treated as foreigners forever.

But Kadhafy and the Arabic Libyans (Berber ethnicity largely) do not have on the agenda such large-scale citizen conversion out of the expats. And now, with the turmoil broiling hot to oust him, Kadhafy may be as blind as ‘three blind mice’ to even notice the expats who are fleeing the conflict.

Filipinos are a bit lucky in that, with just a score of thousands or so of my compatriots working there, the diverse embassies and consulates in the Mediterranean can act together to help them pull out quickly and go back to Manila. That precisely happened to the expat Filipinos, and so to the thousands of British, Chinese, Japanese, French, and other nationalities.

But not so for the Afro expats such as those coming from Ghana and Ethiopia. There are also those thousands coming from Bangla Desh, Pakistan, and other developing countries. They are in a calamity situation and they badly need humanitarian aid to salve their hunger and daily survival problems.

I guess the very employers of the expats were simply unprepared for the contingencies of a war situation. Nobody in the corporate boards of the employers could have foreseen what was to happen in Libya, and so the employers were caught flat-footed by the rapidity of the force majeure. The echelon officials of the employers pulled out all so suddenly, leaving behind many of their personnel.

Libya is too close to Europe which for now is in the best position to rush aid to those displaced expats. Egypt and Tunisia were burnt out by their own turmoil that overthrew their chief execs, so they are sadly unprepared for large-scale contingencies to help out the overflowing thousands of displaced expats.

Now, how far can Europeans share aid and in what form, as well as how far can they assist the expats to get back to their respective countries, remains to be seen. The lackadaisical action from Europe could backlash in due time, with the Afro and 3rd world expats finding every route they can to migrate to Europe instead, and eke out a life there as illegal migrants.

And Europeans better be quick in helping out. For several other Arab states are burning in infernal social turbulence, and they too can see expats as well as their own citizens migrating in huge waves to Europe for greener pasteurs.

[Philippines, 16 March 2011]

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INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY MUST INTERVENE IN LIBYA

INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY MUST INTERVENE IN LIBYA

Erle Frayne D. Argonza

World opinion has been moving closer to approving a full intervention to oust Libya’s mad leader Kadhafy. As to what forms of intervention will be adopted, global leaders are still in the dark as of the moment.

I am not wont to see foreign intervention myself in the internal affairs of any country. This is a matter of respecting the principle of sovereignty, mutual respect, and cooperation among nations.

The Libyan case is different however. Arab citizens who were sick and tired of the authoritarian Kadhafy regime voiced their collective decision to oust Kadhafy via peaceful means, in the same way that Egyptians and Tunisians did before them. But Kadhafy chose to gun down and bomb to smithereens the peaceful protestors, and that constitutes the heinous crime of genocide.

Libya’s own anti-Kadhafy forces are allergic to direct intervention from outside, but given the situation that Kadhahy had stocks of billions of money to wage an enduring war of attrition, the cash-starved anti-Kadhafians better rethink their position. The mass slaughter in Rwanda finally ended precisely when a contingent of external forces sweepingly invaded Rwanda and deposed the mad leadership there, and the Rwandan precedent is there for the Oust Kadhafy rebels to study and follow.

True, economic progress did see the light of day during Kadhafy’s permanent incumbency. An infrastructure boom has been taking place prior to the protests. Just by looking at those glimpses of Libya provided by international news reporters, one is given the chance to witness the urbanization and good planning done in the rising cities there.

But Libya’s path to progress was done at the expense of civil liberties. The country is awash with gory narratives of how Kadhafy’s detractors were jailed, tortured, and brutally killed in prison camps. When Kadhafy is gone, investigators ought to conduct diggings of possible mass graves and show the world the deaths that took place as social price of Kadhafy’s version of economic progress.

Libya’s economy benefited almost exclusively from oil revenues, and whenever vast quantities of oil are concerned there also are the Anglo-European financiers working behind the scene to cash in on the Libyan oil. Even now, the same financiers have been manipulating the petrol spot market for colossal profits from out of oil price hikes, thanks to their front man Moammar Kadhafy.

We just hope that when Kadhafy will be ousted, the link between his Libyan oil billions and the Western financiers will be exposed to the hilt. I will be lauding the major media outfits if they will take on the cudgels of exposing the threads of greed as mentioned above, which I doubt will happen. So far, only the fringe groups have been doing the daring investigations if ever, such as the Executive Intelligence Review circle.

Meantime, the world community is talking about the Libyan conflict, and configuring courses of action to intervene in that ‘regime change’ phenomenon. What should be clear from the onset is that the Libyans themselves are the heroes of the Oust Kadhafy movement, even as the burden of reconstructing a badly damaged post-Kadhafy nation will fall in their shoulders.

[Philippines, 16 March 2011]

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