On September Ist, a group of young army officers overthrew the archaic and oppressive regime of King Idris of Libya. In its place they established a Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) which has already irked Britain and the United States by taking steps to remove the huge US base near Tripoli. The following inter view with a member of the RCC was made by Ania Francos, a French journalist for the maga zine Le Front.
Lieutenant-Colonel El Mokadem, who must have been a captain or a lieutenant before the coup, waited for me at the door. Small, thin, he is twenty-five, but seems even younger. The epaulettes of his beige battle-dress bore traces of the braiding he had torn off. "We don't want to become a caste," he said, "and besides, braiding and medals are ridiculous.
Extremely shy, with a secret air about him, speaking Arabic in a soft voice, he refused at first to answer my questions, put to him in Eng ish, which he speaks very well "My story is the same as that of all my comrades. We all were at high school, coming in general from poor peasant families, though some of us were children from bourgeois backgrounds. We understood the misery of the people, the corruption of our leaders, the foreign occupation (of the Italian colonialists) ... In 1948 we were children, but it seems as though we ourselves lived the occupation of Palestine by the Israelis. Finally, at the beginning of secondary school, some of us decided to build a Revolutionary committee. We did form it, about eight years ago. We understood that in our county, were taere is no revorumionary party, the only way of taking power is to control the Army. So many of us, after the end of high school, entered military academies in Libya and Europe, or even directly into the Army. In 1964 we reorganised our movement and formed an exclusively military central com mittee. Its first meeting took place at Tolmeitha, on a beach near Tripoli. But we have never been very numerous. We didn't have confidence."
It is said in Tripoli that the young officers struck on September 1 to pull the rug from under other groups of superior officers who were themselves planning coups-some in support of the Iraqi Baath party, others in the pay of Anglo-American economic interests. I asked El Mokadem if this was true. He smiled, and declared, "No one other than us, the young people, could have pulled off a real revolution. This wasn't a putsch, you know. We succeeded because we wee outo Hake revo lon mand Council, on the first day of the coup, made a mistake and said on the radio, "Unity, Socialism, Liberty", which is the triple-threat slogan of the Baathists. (The Baathist party is the ruling party in Irag and Syria, and incorporatec not somalist and same emers asked El Mokadem whether the mistake meant that the great currents which presently divide the Arab world politically (Nasserism, Baathism, Arab nationalism, and Marxism) are reflected in the Council of the Revolution?
"If you want to put it that way," said the officer. "But in terms of influencing us, not really. You've said yourself, we're for unity, socialism and liberty, for Palestine and for the Arab Nation. However you order the words, we we're all, primarily, nationalists. So we don't want the Council of Libya to become a closed battlefield for quarrels between these different movements.
"But what does Arab unity mean to you exactly?"
His answer came like a cry from his heart: "The Unity of all Arabs from the Persian Gulf to the Atlantic Ocean."
"Meaning unity with Faisal (the feudal king of Saudi Arabia) and with Hassan (the bourgeois dictator of Morocco), plus Nasser, Algeria, and you?"
"Ah, no," he said. "Unity of the progressives only Well, then, the whole world won't be unified tomorrow!"
He laughs. "Not tomorrow, that's right, but revolutions sometimes happen when you're not expecting them I had noticed in almost every conversation | heard in Libya a sort of hostility to the idea of the Great Maghreb (the union of North African countries bordering the western deserts, including the Sahara. So I asked whether the Libyans felt closer to Egypt than to Algeria.
He moved his head as though I were touching upon a delicate subject. "We're very close to revolutionary Algeria, but we feel that the prob lems of the Arabs of the Middle East are our problems. For us, the construction of the Great Maghreb is not a very practical business. We are for the unity of the entire Arab nation. That's the only important thing. But if the unity of the the Maghreb is a stage on the road toward the unity of the Arab nation, then we're for it." And he adds, "You know, the unity of the Arab nation is not a reactionary slogan. Even for the rest of the world, it's important that the Arab world be unified."
"There never used to be anv political parties strictly Libyan, coming out of the revolution.
Others want a front, still others want us to join one of the big parties of the Middle East."
I asked him if he thought there exists in the Arab world today a party in power capable of But to feel social injustice, foreign oppres sion, that's already a lot.
"Is it sufficient in 1969?"
"But what drives the masses to make the revolution, if not misery, injustice and corruption?"
I asked him whether he really believed in class struggle.
"As for me, I'm a Marxist, but some of my comrades haven't come that far yet. Neverthe less, they're patriots and revolutionaries."
For the Libyans, Palestine "Lost" is still an open wound. But in their speeches, they speak less about the resistance of the Palestinian people than of the necessity of unifying the Arab armies for the next battle against Israel.
"We think," he says, "that the resistance will not win without the Arab armies, and viceversa.
I was astonished. Hadn't the defeat of '67 taught them anything about classical Arab auntes!
He answered me with such a passion, that I understood the frustration of these officers when in 67 they were arrested by the king for having tried to go to the front. "But we weren't surprised in '67 when we couldn't get across to the battlefield. Israel had a real technological advantage over the Arabs; the West had given them arms, information, everything. We had to unity ourselves, acquire modern armaments, Please send me the BLACK DWARF for the next 6/12 months I enclose po/cheque for £1/£2.
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Address The BLACK DWARF, 7 Carlisle Street, London WIA 4PZ Telephone: 01-734 4827 Foreign subs: Asia/Africa/N. & S. America/ Australia: ₺5 per learn techniques ... Of course, you need popular armies, but you also need modern arms. We wanted them."
But if the liberation of Palestine io at the centre of their preoccupations, economic prob lems are not less important. "We must give back о ou popic, »no are uscu to corrupuon, ense of working the land, a pleasure in it. We have to irrigate the desert, modernise agriculture: and what to do about oil? Of course, the ideal, for the people, would be to nationalise it because it belongs to them. But can we today?
We talk about Wheelus Field, the huge US military base. "Today, foreign bases aren't the problem. We're here, after all, and we can expect to control what goes on. They can never be the starting point for carrying out aggression against us.
Reference is often made to giving youth an "Islamic morality". Did El Mokadem believe in Islamic socialism?
His eyes fold with irony. "Islamic socialism? Me, I don't believe in it. But I'm sure that some of my comrades do. But you shouldn't take a term like that too literally. Nothing that we say really has anything to do with religion. But our people are not very politicised yet; and they are Believers. Look, you have to understand our situation. We've lived for a century in the shame of of being what we are. We were colonised by the Italians, by the English, by the Americans, up to just a month ago. We want our people to rediscover the pride of what they really are ...
And what is that?
"Arabs," he says, getting up and accompany ing me to the door.
Liberation News Service
in maren 1968 the inhabitants of My Lai, old men, women, children, were liquidated by C Company of the Americal Division's 11th Infantry Brigade. Twenty months later photographs of the massacre were spread across the pages of the bourgeois press. It had become a story.
Despite the heroic journalists who had reported truthfully on Vietnam, despite all the evidence of barbarity and genocide, despite the efforts of the Bertrand Russell Tribunal, the papers and television had never carried such a story before. Yet massacres were known to have taken place. My Lai itself was known to the press-Life, Look and Newsweek turned the "story" down in June.
The US Army also knew. GIs had immediately protested and the Army had received Haeberle's black and white photos as a matter of course. Yet their informal inquiry, headed by Colonel Oren K. Henderson, found nothing. Only a letter from an honest American citizen, not a peacenik, but a man who hated the authoritarian corruption of the US Army, started to get an inquiry moving; and then only because Congressman Udall, unlike the President's office, decided to check his letter. In April 1969 an inquiry was ordered. Pressure for action was evenly balanced against the interests of the Pentagon East. On September 5th, only one day before he was due to leave the Army, and with it its jurisdiction, twenty-six year old 1st Lt William Calley Jr was charged with the murder of Vietnamese civilians.
The brief announcement of this fact was not considered important. For two months, while all the world knew the Vietnamese were being massacred in an atrocity of unparalleled dimensions, the single incident which has come to represent this remained hidden.
It is a measure of the numbed intelligence of the left that no one has asked why My Lai There's a guy down in Benning who is being