by Cilas Kemedjio
On July 17, 1964, Malcolm X, in his role as the Chairman of the Organization of Afro-American Unity, was admitted as an observer at the Summit of the Heads of State and Government of the Organization of African Unity meeting in Cairo. He delivered a memo in which he urged African states to help elevate the struggle then waged by African-Americans against institutionalized racism at the level of human rights. Such a move would, he reasoned, internationalize the struggle and help bring it to the United Nations: “We beseech the independent African States to help us bring our problem before the United Nations, on the grounds that the United States government is morally incapable of protecting the lives and the property of 22 million African-Americans. And on the ground that our deteriorating plight is definitely becoming a threat to world peace.”
On December 13, 1964, before welcoming a Tanzanian speaker on the subject of the Congolese crisis that saw both the secession of Katanga Province and the murder and disappearance of Premier Patrice Lumumba, Malcolm X made these comments about the misuse of the humanitarian rhetoric: “Right now, defenseless villages are being bombed, black women and children and babies are being blown to bits by airplanes. Where do these airplanes come from? The United States. You [the press] won’t write that American planes are blowing the flesh from the bodies of black women and black babies and black men. No. Why? Because they’re American planes. As long as they’re American planes, that’s humanitarian.”
In the 1960s, the United States prevailed in framing the discrimination faced by African-Americans as a domestic issue. The problem consequently never reached the United Nations. Fast-forward to 2011, when shortly after rebel forces started an insurrection in Libya, the United Nations Security Council passed resolution 1973, sponsored by France and the United Kingdom. This Resolution mandated that all necessary means be mobilized to protect civilians and civilian-populated areas. But, as this article by Dan Kovalik demonstrates, intervention in Libya was a militarized humanitarian campaign led by the forces of the North Atlantic Treaty; any “humanitarian” motives were understood at the time to be “limited, conditional,” and referring to “a past situation.” The intervention in Libya therefore gave the legal and moral cover for regime change.
Libya has since descended into chaos, and the interventionist humanitarian states have failed to take responsibility. These internal messages add insult to injury by revealing the hijacking of humanitarianism to advance political agendas. We suspected this was the case. We now know it was indeed about politics, not saving lives.
Clinton Emails on Libya Expose The Lie of ‘Humanitarian Intervention’
by Dan Kovalik for Huffpost Politics