Climate of Fear Read Online Free PDF Page A

view on the continent was that this was a PLO gambit, aided and abetted by some Middle East allies, and there were sufficient reasons to lean toward such a view. Libya—and Gadhafi—entered the list of suspects some time later.
    That studied muteness, I felt, could only be born out of fear. The political club that was then the Organization of African Unity made only the most tepid statements of condemnation. If it set up its own technical commission of investigation, it must have been deliberately low-key, an apologetic step that was shrouded in mystery—for fear of reprisals? Political cowardice or a lack of moral will, what dominated the thinking of many African leaders was, frankly, “Let us keep mute and maybe he will exempt us from his current revolutionary rampage, or at least exercise his restraining influence and cloak us in selective immunity.” They had only to recall that Libya, headed by a young maverick called Gadhafi, was then at the height of its powers. It advertised a progressive, even radical, agenda, one that threatened corrupt as well as repressive governments, provided a training ground for dissidents of the left, right, or indeterminate—and not merely on the African continent. In short, the fear of Libya was the beginning of wisdom.
    That silence obtained its rebuke when contrasted with the combative cry of the world over Lockerbie. It was indeed a shock of contrasts. In the case of Lockerbie, a painstaking exercise of detective work spanned continents. The culprits were not only identified but boldly advertised, and a pursuit of the malefactors undertaken until they were eventually brought before a court of justice. That culture of “neighborly reticence”—let us take note—is yet again paralyzing the will of African leaders today as they turn a blind eye to the genocidal operations currently being waged in the Sudan. A new Rwanda is in the making—to cite the belated acknowledgment by the secretary-general of the United Nations—but the victims wait in vain for the moral outcry of a continent, or a structure of relief from the global community.
    Again, an updated postscript to the pairing of those two aerial assaults: in the terms of settlements finally agreed in the last year by the Libyan government, the Niger atrocity appeared to be constantly attached as a footnote, a minor codicil to the Lockerbie agreement, almost an afterthought. Those terms of settlement, being derisory in comparison, further bore out my earlier plaint: even in the supposedly egalitarian domain of death, some continue to die more equally than others. But the succession of Lockerbie by Niger had at least impressed one fact on the world: the enthronement of a qualitatively different climate of fear, an expression of global dominance through a disregard for innocents, without respect to territory, and without even a pragmatic questioning of the possible rupturing of existing political alliances. Libya was after all—still is—a member of the Organization of African Unity, now the African Union. That fact did not prevent her assault on the constituency of that organization. The implicit proclamation appeared to be that, in the new arena of conflicts, there would be no cordon sanitaire, no sanctuary for innocents, no space that was out of bounds in the territorial claims of a widening climate of fear.
    Even as the foregoing was being drafted, just a few months ago, the world was astounded by a once unthinkable volte-face by the Libyan government. I listened in a state of near hypnosis as the Libyan leader stepped up to the microphones to renounce not only the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction but—terrorism! Within the radical caucuses of the sixties, seventies, and eighties on the African continent, any suggestion that Mr. Gadhafi was remotely linked with the promotion of acts that involved the arbitrary disposition of lives, and should be condemned for this, was