But there remains a dark aura that could put a negative reflection on American involvement in this civil war. News came yesterday that the rebels are heading towards Sirte, hometown of Qaddafi and a bastion of support for him in the clan-based rivalries that his iron grip has blocked from view during his rule. This is eerily similar to two conflicts where outside powers have intervened and ended up allowing war crimes to be perpetrated that were the result of old rivalries that boiled over without the power structure that previously held the groups in check.
1. Sabra-Shatilla-The massacre at the two Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut was done by the Maronite Christian militia, the Phalangists, that was the military wing of the party run by Bashir Gemayel, then-president of Lebanon. The Lebanese Civil War had started in 1975, catalyzed by the arrival of the PLO in 1968, which started launching attacks into Israel with a base in southern Lebanon and Yasser Arafat and the other leadership in Beirut. A consociational government had divided power between the Shia, Sunni, Maronites, and Druze, with little conflict. But the arrival of a great deal of Palestinians and their de-facto government was set to upset the instable peace.
Israel invaded in 1978 and 1982 to eliminate the PLO, and allied itself with the Phalangists who wanted to rid Lebanon of the PLO and sue into submission the Muslim populations. But in 1982, Israeli soldiers watched from a distance and heard the massacre in the camps, only seeing them the next day. The resulting trauma to Israeli soldiers present is shown by Ari Folman in his animated documentary, Waltz with Bashir, who were scared to remember what they witnessed during their deployment. The PLO left for Tunisia following the war, but Israel, and defense minister Ariel Sharon, created an even worse impression on Lebanon that has helped lead to the rise of Hezbollah into a leadership role in the government today.
2. Bosnia-Josef Tito was an excellent leader. Leading Yugoslavia, he insulted the Soviet Union, drawing the ire of Stalin, and helped start the first international organization for the developing world by the developing world, the Non-Aligned Movement. Tito played into an alliance with the United States, and kept down the strife between the Slavic groups that hated each other. Somehow, Tito kept them united through his rule. (An excellent analogy for this unstable union can be seen in the relationship between famous Yugoslavian basketball players Vlade Divac, a Serb, and Drazen Petrovic, a Croat, who trailblazed the Euro invasion of the NBA but died in a car accident during the peak of his career.)
But following his death, things started to change. The government began to weaken as ethnic groups pined for independence. Each group wanted autonomy but also to dominate the other, so civil war broke out. Serbs, under the leadership of Milosevic and Karadzic massacred Bosnians to ethnically cleanse the land they wanted to be theirs. American warplanes and peacekeeping forces ended the conflict, kept rivalry simmering with the Dayton Agreement making everyone unhappy.
The legacy of colonialism casts a long shadow in Libya, Lebanon, and the former Yugoslavia, but that shadow is neither as long nor as dark as that of the rivalries of ethnic groups, religious groups, and clans that were present before their arrival. Removing stability-creating forces, even as autocratic as Tito and Qaddafi, may benefit the country in the long-run, but it also opens up opportunities for these rivalries to play out so one group they can say they had the last laugh.
Please watch Sirte for the next few days, and watch how, if a new government does rise, it deals with clan tensions. Qaddafi may have been a terrible leader and an asshole to his countrymen, but innocent people associated with him because of clan ties should not be harmed to have revenge for his rule.
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