By Lisa Macdonald
TRIPOLI — More than 1000 representatives of political parties, governments, solidarity and peace organisations and the media converged on Tripoli in Libya on April 14 and 15 to attend the International Spring Festival for Peace and Freedom.
The conference, in solidarity with Libya against US imperialism, was titled "Globalisation and Hegemony". Politicians, academics and cultural leaders from most Arab and African states, Louis Farakhan's Nation of Islam in the US, Asian trade unionists and many others addressed the difficulties confronting Third World and many Arab countries in the US's "new world order" and the need for economic and political unity to defeat US imperialism.
The conference was organised by the Libyan government to coincide with the anniversary of the United States bombing of Tripoli and Benghazi on April 14, 1986. One hundred people were killed during that air raid, including Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Qadhafi's adopted daughter.
Since the September 1, 1969, bloodless revolution in which the US puppet King Idris was overthrown by the Free Unionist Officers under Qadhafi's command, Libya has been singled out by the west as one of the "bad" Arab states.
For 27 years, the US and its allies have waged a covert and overt war against Libya, including a series of CIA-orchestrated assassination attempts, provocative incursions into Libyan territorial waters by the US Navy and blaming Libya for the December 1988 disaster when a Pan Am jumbo blew up over Lockerbie in Scotland, killing 270 people, and the crash of a French UTA jet in Niger in 1989.
The 1986 bombing of Libya was justified by the Ronald Reagan administration as retribution for Libya's supposed bombing of the La Belle discotheque in West Berlin which killed one of the US military personnel who frequented the nightclub. To date, no conclusive evidence has been presented to link the Libyan government to that attack, or to the Pan Am and UTA disasters.
The real reason for the imperialist governments' campaign against Libya, and similarly against Cuba and Iraq, is the hope of obstructing the political and economic development of these countries which have declared themselves independent of US influence.
Even after King Idris proclaimed Libya's formal independence in December 1951, Britain, France and the US maintained de facto control of the country which, while it was one of the world's poorest, was strategically important for the imperialists' control of north-east Africa and the eastern basin of the Mediterranean.
These governments had unrestricted access to Libya's military bases (the Wheelus airfield outside Tripoli was the US's first air base in Africa, built at the cost of US$100 million), and to its oil, the only source of Middle Eastern oil unaffected by the closure of the Suez Canal. By 1967, US private investment in Libya was US$456 million, the second highest after South Africa.
Within days of the 1969 revolution, the new government announced that it would not renew the foreign base agreements and that 51% of foreign banks would be nationalised.
In 1973, Libya nationalised 51% of all oil companies and doubled the price of its crude oil. In 1974, it nationalised three US oil companies and announced an oil embargo on the US. In 1990, Libya incurred the further wrath of the US by opposing the imperialists' war against Iraq.
The US, France and Britain have never forgiven Qadhafi for kicking them out. In 1992 they sponsored a motion, narrowly passed by the United Nations Security Council, to impose sanctions against Libya. These sanctions, still in place today, ban trade in arms and aircraft parts and repairs, and international air links.
Until Qadhafi is replaced by another King Idris and the Libyan government is once again under the control of the imperialist powers, there is unlikely to be any let up- in the anti-Libya campaign. International solidarity against this aggression and for the right to self-determination by the Libyan people is as necessary today as ever.