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Are we living through the least violent moment in human history? Has there ever been an age, during the past 10,000 years, with fewer wars or mass killings or chances of being murdered?

The answer seems, to me, almost self-evident. There are terrible wars today, but they are extremely scarce, not very intense and do not affect the lives of many people. If we assume that Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Syria and Somalia are all “at war” today and all their people are affected, that means that just over 2 per cent of the world’s people know war. If you add simmering events like the Western Sahara conflict, the Middle East showdown and the Mexican drug wars, you might, at a stretch, get up to 4 per cent.

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Never before has this been the case. Forty years ago, at least a tenth of the world appeared to be in conflict; 70 years ago, more than half the world was. Earlier, it was no better: Pre-modern history (before 1500) was exceedingly murderous and violent, followed by half a millennium when near-total war was more norm than exception. Violent crime has become a rarity, rather than a part of daily life, almost everywhere. Not only violence, but the attitudes that glorify violence, are now rare exceptions rather than cultural norms.

I realize this. Yet I am also guilty of helping create the opposite perception. I have reported on dozens of murders, more than one mass slaying, and I have done much reporting from Afghanistan, Libya, Bosnia, Kosovo and other places stricken with violence. I offer no apology: We need to know about these things. But the totality of all these front pages does create a false perception of the state of the world.

To help me atone for this, the Canadian evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker has done a great service by pulling together all the data on violence and war from the past 15,000 years.

“Violence,” he concluded in a lecture in Napa, Calif., in advance of a forthcoming book The Better Angels of Our Nature, “has been in decline over long stretches of time, and we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species’ existence.”

His evidence is overwhelming. If you look at the odds that a death will occur by violence, paleontological investigations show that in prehistoric and pre-modern times it ranged from 5 per cent to 60 per cent, but averaged around 15 per cent – that is, more than one in six deaths were violent. In modern times, this figure peaked at around 3 per cent worldwide in the 20th century (including all wars, genocides and famines); today it is about three one-hundredths of 1 per cent.

Homicide rates have seen a 50-fold decline from the Middle Ages to the present, with a slight uptick in the second half of the 20th century (which raised them back to early 20th-century levels) and then a further drop after 1990.

Dr. Pinker finds the same sharp, near-constant declines in every category he examines: Judicial torture, capital punishment, slavery, rape, lynching, hate crime, racial hostility, spouse-murder, domestic violence, child abuse – everything that can be measured has seen a marked and almost constant downward slant.

But the most important attention that Dr. Pinker devotes is to the past hundred years. For although wars became far less frequent in the 20th century, they obviously became more deadly. The Second World War, the Nazi and Soviet genocides and famines were the deadliest individual events in human history (even if the odds of dying by violence were still higher in earlier centuries).

In the six decades since the Second World War, though, wars have stopped being the major concerns of the world. Deaths from war peaked in the late 1940s and early 1950s at about 300 deaths per 100,000 people. They then fell below five deaths per 100,000. Since about 1990 – even including the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, which together killed more than 125,000 civilians – these decades have seen immeasurably little war death, far below one person per 100,000.

What has caused this dramatic shift away from war and violence? Steven Pinker argues that Thomas Hobbes was right: The creation of a “Leviathan” of governments and laws has reduced the incentives for violence; in short, it has civilized us. And the pacifying effects of global commerce have reduced the incentives for violence between states. To this, he adds the “expanding circle” of empathy caused by modern transportation and communications, and the “escalator of reason” caused by fast-expanding education and literacy. If you wanted to sum all these theories up, you could say that violence simply stopped making sense.

It is more than just popular misunderstanding and newspaper headlines that lead us to believe that the world has become more, not less, violent. This is built a long tradition of human thought, rooted in Christian notions of original sin. A great many Enlightenment thinkers, chief among them John Locke, believed that the Hobbesian “state of nature” was actually an idyll of natural law and cooperation, only to be soiled by the damaging effects of civilization. This idea was picked up by Karl Marx, who saw precapitalist society as inherently peaceful and cooperative, and amplified by some anthropologists such as Marshall Sahlins, who in his book Stone Age Economics argued that prehistoric humans were peaceful and cooperative. But a wider anthropological perspective shows that primitive humans are likely highly organized and cooperative, but are also highly reliant on violence as a means of survival.

But there is one thing that neither Dr. Pinker nor I can answer: Is this sharp twenty-first century decline in violence permanent? Or are we living in a trough between two terrible peaks, a calm before another global storm? On this, we can only hope.

Original Article

From the moment he stepped off his jet in Cairo Tuesday night to find thousands of Egyptian fans shouting “God is great,” this was far more than a routine visit by a foreign leader.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish Prime Minister, toured the newly liberated capitals of Egypt, Tunisia and Libya this week with the sort of popularity usually reserved for pop stars. He is polling as the most popular politician, by far, in virtually every country of the Middle East, and for the revolutionary generation who turned to the Middle East’s only Muslim democracy for inspiration, he is a conquering hero.

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Not since the Kurdish sultan Saladin recaptured Egypt, Syria and Jerusalem from the Europeans in the 1100s, some commentators remarked as Mr. Erdogan filled TV screens across the region, has a non-Arab held such widespread popularity and uncontested influence in the Arab world.

But it is exactly those sort of imperial analogies that have Westerners worried about Turkey’s new assertiveness. It has become popular to call Mr. Erdogan’s tactics “neo-Ottoman,” after the Turk-led Muslim empire that conquered much of Europe, the Middle East and north Africa between the 14th and the 19th centuries. The worry is that Turkey is now turning away from its European roots – after being shunned by the European Union in its bid for membership – and using the power vacuums to its south to link up with the region’s Islamist parties and form a network of Islamic power to threaten the West.

It is a misleading analogy, mistaking Mr. Erdogan’s bold but self-interested mission for some sort of Islamic imperialism, but it is a popular and understandable one.

After all, Mr. Erdogan, a former Islamist and devout believer, launched this tour after turning a minor spat with Israel, Turkey’s traditional staunch ally, into an outright conflagration. After Israel refused to apologize earlier this month for its army’s killing of nine Turkish civilians aboard the controversial aid flotilla to Gaza in May of 2010, Mr. Erdogan responded furiously by withdrawing Turkey’s ambassador, suspending its military co-operation with Israel, and freezing all trade ties with the Jewish state.

His Arab tour has been laced with fiery criticisms of Israel, glowing support for the Palestinian cause, and macho statements suggesting a military showdown: “Israel will no longer be able to do what it wants in the Mediterranean,” he told an audience in Tunis on Thursday, “and you’ll be seeing Turkish warships in this sea.” That was only one of several such alarming sabre-rattling statements, suggesting that the spat with Israel is in large part intended to send a message of solidarity to his country’s Arab neighbours.

That, combined with the warm mutual embrace between Mr. Erdogan and leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood (who tend to tell Western reporters that they see Turkey as their role model), has led some to fear that Europe’s largest Muslim state is turning to the dark side. It’s an alarming prospect, given that Turkey has Europe’s largest standing army and has become wealthy enough, from gas pipelines and industrial exports to Europe, to become a major power.

Yet most informed observers of Turkish diplomacy would say that’s a serious misreading.

“Yes, Turkey has been engaging its neighbourhood, and not just in the Middle East, and building its influence with Muslim states,” said Joshua W. Walker, a Turkey specialist who is a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, “but it would be a mistake to think that this is a move away from the West or from democracy or secularism. They’re making a shift from a French style of secularism to an American one, where you’re allowed to be religious and still be in government, but there’s no sign that Turkey is moving away from the West.”

Indeed, many Western diplomats, including those from the United States, quietly say that Mr. Erdogan’s eastern turn is a welcome and beneficial development – in good part because it could herald the eclipse of Saudi Arabia’s and Iran’s much more dangerous influence over the Arab states, but also because what Mr. Erdogan is doing is hardly imperial or Islamist.

His key message to Egyptians, delivered in a national TV interview, is that they should get rid of their old sharia-based constitution and become a secular state. “In Turkey, constitutional secularism is defined as the state remaining equidistant to all religions,” he said. “In a secular regime people are free to be religious or not.”

And if there was any ambiguity, he then told Egyptians that the most important thing Arabs should learn from Turkey is secularism – a word that is close to unmentionable in Egypt these days.

“I recommend a secular constitution for Egypt,” he said. “Do not fear secularism because it does not mean being an enemy of religion. I hope the new regime in Egypt will be secular. I hope that after these remarks of mine the way the Egyptian people look at secularism will change.”

That message was heard loudly across the Arab world, and provoked angry responses from the Brotherhood and other Islamist groups (who nevertheless still sought to associate themselves with the Turkish leader).

And it came alongside a number of other signs that Turkey is far from turning eastward. Just as he was falling into his feud with Israel, Mr. Erdogan struck a bold deal with the United States to use his country as the staging ground for a missile defence system that uses huge radar installations to protect against Iranian missile attacks. A senior U.S. official told the New York Times that it is “the most significant military co-operation between Washington and Ankara since 2003” and it was widely seen as part of a major boost in the country’s 59-year-old membership in NATO. At the same time, Turkey joined a major antiterrorism initiative with the United States. And its trade and political relations with European states have been growing strongly.

“If you actually examine what is happening,” says Fadi Hakura, head of the Turkey Project at London’s Chatham House, “you realize that this is the best possible situation for the United States and Europe – you have a strongly allied country that can exercise a tough position with Israel without promoting the kind of violence that other regional actors like Iran did.” In other words, Turkey may play the bad cop with Israel, but unlike Tehran, it won’t be interested in bankrolling terrorists groups like Hezbollah.

Mr. Ergdogan’s eastern thrust, accompanied by large aid expenditures across the Middle East, North Africa and Somalia, is part of a strategy engineered by Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu to build Turkey’s regional influence in order to avoid the multiple crises Turkey faced before 2000 when it was surrounded on all sides by menacing, unstable authoritarian states.

Mr. Davutoglu’s strategy is based on what he calls a “zero problems” relationship with Turkey’s neighbours, designed to minimize expensive confrontations. Given the bellicose standoff with Israel this week, and Mr. Erdogan’s own drift back into military conflict with his own Kurdish minority (whom he’d previously spent a decade granting impressive minority rights), it’s obvious that the problems with Turkey these days are far from zero. But they might be a lot fewer than you’d think.

Original Article

Benghazi

For more than 20 years, he was Moammar Gadhafi’s most notorious political prisoner – the Islamist ringleader who escaped the 1996 one-day massacre of 1,200 of his fellow inmates and survived a decade in solitary confinement.

Today, as Col. Gadhafi’s rebel opponents falter in the rebel capital of Benghazi, Mohammed Busidra has quietly turned himself into the post-Gadhafi kingmaker.

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While secular and military figures have fallen into factional fighting, Mr. Busidra, 53, has brought together Libya’s disparate moderate Islamist leaders into the country’s only united political force. He has written a constitution that they have agreed upon, and is organizing Libya’s mosques into a political machine. This has made him, in the view of many people here, the figure who will wield the most political power, and likely control the country’s leadership, in the event of the dictator’s demise.

“We have to prepare our country politically now, to prevent any political vacuum from occurring when the criminal Gadhafi is gone,” Mr. Busidra said in the first interview he has given since early March. “And I can assure you, when we Islamists establish a party, which will be on a national basis, I think we will win comfortably.”

This assessment is shared, sometimes with alarm, by many of his opponents.

“The Islamist opposition are much better organized and financed than us because they are focused entirely on politics,” says Mohammed Bujamaya, founder of the Liberal Gathering, one of several secularist proto-parties struggling for recognition in Benghazi. “We are tied up with the crisis, while they have their figures outside of Benghazi and sometimes out of the country, scheming.”

The prospect of the multinational NATO air-warfare campaign, in which Canada is a participant, effectively helping usher in a democratic Islamist government is causing some unease among member nations. “It is not the best outcome we could hope for, but the Islamists will probably play a role,” says one European diplomat.

On the other hand, some Western figures say they prefer to keep Mr. Busidra empowered because he has worked to prevent Islamic extremists – such as al-Qaeda fighters and jihadist veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns – from becoming influential in post-Gadhafi politics.

“I make a point of meeting with these fighters,” Mr. Busidra says, “And what I say is: ‘Let us be clear from now on. If you are here to represent your ideologies, or to represent al-Qaeda, please leave our country.’ “ His group is presenting itself as a moderate Islamist option, opposed both to the sharia-law absolutism of the Salafists, al-Qaeda and other jihadi fighters, and to secularism.

“I can tell you one thing. I know the Libyan people, and they will not accept very strict Islam – that is definite,” he says. “Yet they will not accept a secular regime. Neither of them will be accepted by Libyans. Those who will win a general election are not secularists or Salafists, but are those who will respect Islam, and at the same time will be able to co-operate with modern life.”

But his moderation only goes so far. For those Libyans hoping that their country will become a liberal-minded holiday destination like neighbouring Tunisia, or a place with European-style equality of gender and sexuality, these Islamists will go only so far.

Mr. Busidra’s proposed Islamist constitution does not impose sharia law – which he says should not be part of the Libyan state – but rather insists that no law be passed which offends the principles of Islam. So, he says, it would remain acceptable for women to leave their heads unveiled (as is frequently done in Libya), as long as head scarves aren’t mentioned in law. But, he insists, both alcohol and homosexuality will have to remain strictly illegal, as will the praise of any religion other than Islam.

Mr. Busidra’s network is formidable: It includes the long-banned Muslim Brotherhood; the February 17 Martyrs’ Brigade, which is the largest fighting force among the rebel armies and is led by the influential cleric Ismail Al-Sallabi; the even more popular cleric, Mr. Sallabi’s Doha-based brother Sheikh Ali Sallabi; and a half-dozen other imams and leaders well known in Libya, including more moderate former members of the long-banned Libyan Islamic Fighting Group. Mr. Busidra’s circle is opposed to the extreme Islam of al-Qaeda and other radical groups.

The Islamists have largely stayed outside of the Benghazi-based National Transitional Council, Libya’s internationally recognized interim rebel government, in large part because NTC executives must pledge not to enter politics after the revolution. But they appear to be dominating military matters and attempting to influence the highest ranks of the NTC.

This point was all rendered much more stark this week with the killing of General Abdel Fatah Younis, the rebels’ top military commander, apparently by members of one of the Islamist-led militias who are part of Mr. Busidra’s circle.

In a sign of this Islamist network’s increasing power, this week Col. Gadhafi’s leading son, Saif al-Islam Gadhafi, gave an interview in which he claimed that he had struck a deal with Ali Sallabi to share power. Mr. Sallabi denied this, though he said he had met with Mr. Gadhafi to discuss a surrender. Whether Saif’s statement was a tactic to divide the opposition or to frighten the West with the spectre of an Islamist aftermath, it showed that Mr. Busidra’s network has become the leading post-revolutionary force.

Mr. Busidra says that he will not run for president, but that he is pushing for Sheikh Ali Sallabi to run: “We regard him as a very qualified leader. He’s very moderate, he’s also very nationalist, and I think most of the people like him.”

But there is something of the campaigning politician in Mr. Busidra himself. He speaks in clear English whose slight Welsh twinge betrays his background – it was while studying biochemistry at Cardiff University that he discovered political Islam – and acts like a diplomat: He opens the interview with lavish praise for Canada’s participation in the NATO campaign. “If Canada didn’t get involved, we could have all been killed by now … we are thankful to Canada and the rest of the alliance, and we hope you will put more effort into accelerating the disappearance of this criminal.”

Islamist politics are not an inevitable outcome in Libya, a country whose people often wear their religion lightly and abhor the strict asceticism of Saudi-style Islamic leadership.

But Mr. Busidra’s group has a number of advantages over any political competition. For one thing, their names – especially Mr. Busidra’s – are virtually synonymous with the February 17 protests whose brutal repression by Mr. Gadhafi’s forces marked the birth of the Libyan revolution. Mr. Busidra, already a well-known preacher, gained popularity in February when he issued a fatwa making it a sin not to join the protests.

Those protests began as mass rallies in support of the mothers of the 1,270 Islamists, mainly young men, who were machine-gunned to death at Tripoli’s Abu Salim prison on one day in 1996. The civil-rights lawyer who represented the mothers, Abdul Hafiz Ghoga, is a staunch secularist who is now the vice-chairman of the rebels’ NTC administration (and is also thought to have a future in politics).

Mr. Busidra had been the negotiator for the prisoners in 1996. Like most of them, he had been imprisoned in 1989 with no charge, after having joined the Pakistani-based Muslim proselytizing movement Tablighi Jamaat – usually considered very moderate and apolitical – while studying engineering in Wales. He would spend the next 20 years and six months in prison, many of them as an organizer of other Islamists.

The fact that he was spared indicates that he was considered powerful enough to be kept alive as a bargaining chip. And when he was released in 2009, as part of a rapproachement with the West organized by Saif Gadhafi, he was given the job of organizing Libya’s prison religious services by Mustafa Abdul Jalil, who was then Libya’s reformist justice minister and is now the head of the rebels’ NTC.

The prison experience, he says, turned him into more of a nationalist than a mere holy man. “I was 30 when I went into prison; when I came out, I was 51,” he says. “So it means I have grown up, and I have started to think, and see things from another point of view.”

And, he says, his group will remain favourable toward the West and its governments and oil corporations, and will not have any objection to sharing power with secular and liberal parties – so long as they don’t offend the Islamists’ core principles.

“The moment they respect our values – Islamic values – and the moment they won’t impose any law or any constitutional rule which is against Islam, we have no reason not to co-operate with liberals and secularists,” he says. “We have no objection to anybody ruling us, as long as there is justice, freedom and equality. During Gadhafi’s days, there was nothing like that.”

Photo by Doug Saunders

Original Article

Benghazi

One of the few really steady jobs in liberated eastern Libya these days is that of caricaturist, and guys such as Adil Mansur are cleaning up. The 30-year-old history student has drawn posters of dictator Moammar Gadhafi as a dog, a snake and a hanging victim. Today he is producing a large image of rebel interim-government leader Mustafa Abdul Jalil as a mellow and saintly figure.

Another growth field is TV talk-show host. While the regime’s network still broadcasts hours of Col. Gadhafi and his deputies in empty rooms staring straight at the camera and shouting for hours about the crimes of Libya’s enemies, the rebel-controlled network instead offers local celebrity Mahmoud El Warfari, who stares straight at the camera in an empty room and shouts for hours about the crimes of Col. Gadhafi.

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Subtlety is in short supply here these days. So is self-criticism: Of the 126 newspapers and more than 100 civil organizations that have sprung up in rebel-held east Libya since a Feb. 17 uprising began the fight against Col. Gadhafi’s control, only one or two offer much other than variations on “Down with Gadhafi” and “Up with the revolution.”

At first, this seemed fair enough. This is, after all, a country at war, and as long as this region’s young men are dying every day in a prolonged and bloody battle for the country’s freedom, a certain amount of cheerleading and patriotic vitriol seemed appropriate.

But now, as the conflict passed its five-month point Sunday, some people here in the rebel capital of Benghazi are starting to worry. The voices of rebel anger and pride, they fear, are starting to sound like mirror images of Col. Gadhafi’s jingoism – and since the schools have been shut down since Feb. 17, they’re worried that all this full-throated zealotry is giving kids the wrong idea.

“It’s been 42 years that we’ve all been hearing the same man yelling at us in the same voice, and now that he’s not here, it’s going to take some time to get used to the sort of world where you can speak with self-criticism or have a diversity of voices,” says Hana El-Gallal, an activist who is pushing for a more open and less homogeneous rebel administration.

Ms. El-Gallal was education minister in the rebels’ National Transitional Council (which Canada and 29 other countries now recognize as the legitimate governing body of Libya), and she pushed to have schools open on Sept. 5 – even if the makeshift government has no money – in large part so children can have something other than a constant diet of revolutionary propaganda.

Now she is part of a small circle of people who are trying to turn the 1.5 million people of eastern Libya and their transitional government from a radical movement into a normal community, complete with disagreements and the questioning of goals.

“We’ve been living in an information blackout and a propaganda state for our entire lives, and now we’re finally allowed to have opposition politics and disagreements within the government without risking our lives – it’s important to do that,” said Enas Al-Drisey, a 23-year-old physics graduate who founded the organization Take Back the Revolution as a voice that criticizes the internal workings of the NTC while still supporting its goals.

That kind of organization would have been unthinkable in Col. Gadhafi’s Libya, and older Libyans are still inured to the idea that theirs is a society without parties, factions or disagreements.

To dispel that notion, Ms. Al-Drisey helped create the newspaper The Reality, which she describes as “the first opposition newspaper.” It began two months ago by criticizing the NTC for turning a blind eye to the theft of food and medical supplies by civil servants – a practice which, she claims, came to a halt as a result of the paper’s muckraking.

While some older and more conservative Libyans have raised eyebrows, this dissent has, for the most part, been tolerated and even welcomed by the NTC.

“Despite the fact that they were kind of slow to do it, I would say that yes, they are turning into a proper government,” Ms. Al-Drisey said. “But there are still a lot of things to overcome. Why don’t they show that they can start fulfilling all the functions of government, and start moving more quickly? After all, they’ve had five months.”

It might take longer. While the NTC has impressed almost everyone by managing to turn eastern Libya into a peaceful and comparatively well-governed place while incorporating every opposition movement under its umbrella and overseeing a war, it still echoes many of the governing and communications methods of the old regime.

On one hand, it has run a surprisingly modern and well-organized media office – something that some fully-formed and well-established countries haven’t yet figured out how to do – right from the beginning.

On the other, it still sends a couple dozen of its female employees out onto the street every afternoon to wave revolutionary placards and whack photos of Col. Gadhafi with shoes in a not-very-impromptu protest.

“As long as Gadhafi’s still around, people are going to want to present a unified front,” Ms. El-Gallal said. “But we can’t put everything aside until the war is over. We have to start being a free society now.”

Original Article

Benghazi, Libya

Six months ago, a typical week in Sadus Jahmi’s life was defined by her high-school class in Green Book Studies, in which she spent three hours memorizing lessons from the baroque and solipsistic manifesto penned by Col. Moammar Gadhafi to justify his one-man rule. Large pictures of the man, in sunglasses and curls, hung in every room, including her parents’ parlour. There was one permissible TV channel, controlled by The Leader. Her future was rigidly defined by a state that owned and controlled almost everything; promotion and success were matters of loyalty, not of talent or hard work.

That was in January. This week Ms. Jahmi, a sunny 14-year-old, began her mornings by heading to a crowded downtown building where she, as news editor, joined a dozen other teenagers putting out the second issue of a weekly newspaper, Youth Call, which they decided to publish simply because they could. Its pages are filled with damning critiques of Col. Gadhafi’s regime, obituaries of classmates killed fighting his forces, and street-corner interviews. This week’s question was, “If he is captured, do you think Gadhafi should be executed?” Eight out of 10 respondents argued for the affirmative.

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Six months ago, Benghazi had five newspapers, all of them stultifying barrages of opaque propaganda. As of this week, it has 126. Most are zealous voices of anti-Gadhafi dissent; a few have made furtive steps into the more interesting and tricky field of criticizing the rebel National Transitional Council. This has been matched with an explosion of political proto-parties, voluntary groups and non-governmental organizations, hundreds of them.

There is still a totalitarian dictatorship in two-thirds of this country, and a particularly gruesome and slow-moving war taking place on its frontiers, but this corner of the country, the former Cyrenaica, is free – free in a way that it never has been, and may never again be. The mood of euphoria and optimism, especially among the literate and connected members of Ms. Jahmi’s generation, is addictive. They have been waiting all their lives to speak this language, and even the more banal routines of civic life carry excitement and novelty. It is the most alive they have ever felt.

But for this very reason, there are dark historic clouds hanging over this moment. This year, for these Libyans, is what 1989 was for young Eastern Europeans. They, too, had seen the effects of four decades of unpopular totalitarianism, had been raised by parents who knew nothing else, had heard inviting electronic messages from the outside world, and had found extraordinary courage. In the months before the regimes fell, there was a profound mood of solidarity, volunteerism, determination and enlivening excitement in the face of danger.

It would be fatuous to draw a parallel between Eastern Europe and Libya: They are very different places facing very different circumstances. But two important lessons extend from that earlier moment of pure euphoria and risk.

1. The morning after the night before. The moment after Col. Gadhafi falls, or dies, or is exiled or imprisoned, will be a post-traumatic moment for young Libyans.

Post-traumatic stress is not a product of people trying to forget terrible moments: On the contrary, it is often a product of people finding themselves transfixed on those moments, which made them feel more alive, more powerful and more important than they ever will afterward. For the tens of thousands of 17-year-old guys shooting their way across the desert with the rebels, the experience of winning, and then becoming ordinary people with bland jobs in a desert petro-state, will be disheartening and may lead to extremism if things go wrong. For people like Ms. Jahmi, there will be a disillusioning period of reduced expectations, and possibly a growing sense of pessimism toward democracy, as we saw in Russia.

2. The breakup pains of solidarity. The feeling of unity and common purpose vanishes the day the tyrant is gone. In Europe, comrades in the anti-communist struggle fast became social democrats, liberals, conservatives or arch-nationalists, destined for lifelong struggles against one another; in Libya, these teenagers will divide into liberal democrats, authoritarian nationalists, and Islamists of several stripes (John Baird, Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister, may be remembered as the Conservative who assisted the transformation of two countries from corrupt secularism to popular Islamism).

The Benghazi Republic, as it may be remembered, is a grand and noble accomplishment, a civil and well-organized community born in a place with no history of democracy. It is worthy of the international recognition it has received. But as we fight and negotiate our way to an end for Libya, we should remember that the people here will be most in need of help in the cold light of the morning after.

Original Article

Benghazi, Libya

As rebel forces carried their wounded back from a failed assault on the oil town of Brega amid rocket explosions and NATO helicopter fire here in eastern Libya on Friday, a more quiet battle, one with potentially larger consequences, was taking place much farther down the Mediterranean coast in the closed meeting rooms of Istanbul.

There, ministers from 30 countries, including Canada, met to offer official recognition and support to the rebel forces fighting dictator Moammar Gadhafi, but also to confront, in private, the far more serious and divisive problem that has emerged from the rebel heartland here in eastern Libya.

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Five months after a protest movement to oust Colonel Gadhafi in February turned into an all-out war with military support from NATO, nobody has a clear idea how the war might be brought to an end – and few nations place much trust in the Libyan actors who are promising to end it.

After Friday’s failed assault and a similar reversal in the western Nafusa mountains, diplomats and military leaders from several NATO countries said they now have serious doubts about whether the ill-trained and disorganized rebel factions are capable of winning the war. This was a key reason, they said, for Europe’s attempt this week at surrender negotiations with Col. Gadhafi: It now seems much easier to bring about a collapse from within. But as worrisome is the prospect of a drawn-out war, officials are equally worried about the prospect of a sudden rebel victory, and its uncertain aftermath.

Either way, the path that leads to Col. Gadhafi’s defeat, and the events that occur afterward, have become subjects of grave interest. The sole concern is now the Libyan endgame.

The Benghazi problem

Officially, Libya’s rebels are based here in Benghazi, under the umbrella of the National Transitional Council, which is now recognized by Canada and more than 30 other countries as “the legitimate governing authority in Libya.” Given that it was created on the fly by a group of university-educated Libyans, lawyers, activists and Gadhafi regime defectors, it is surprisingly professionally run and accountable.

But the problem is that it is only barely in control of the war; it clearly does not represent the full expanse of Libyan opposition; and it is very unlikely to remain a major political body after the war.

Some of the fighting forces, which began as private militias to support eastern businesses, act as political forces unto themselves. Until last month, the largest of the eastern militias, the 17th February Martyrs Brigade, was opposed to the NTC and some other militias; its loyalists had engaged in gun battles with other militias. The brigade’s leader, the well-connected imam, Ismail Al-Sallabi, has hinted that he and his family have political ambitions as Islamist politicians in a post-Gadhafi Libya; they are among several such figures who will overshadow the NTC and its leaders.

Unity, such as it is, appears limited to eliminating Col. Gadhafi. In June, the NTC held a three-way meeting with the eastern brigades, the western fighters and the people claiming to represent the Tripoli resistance, and officially brought them under the same roof. But the western brigades still haven’t joined the Union of the Revolutionary Forces, the central command of the private militias. There are ongoing political and strategic feuds, though Military Council leaders refused to discuss them in detail.

“There is a degree of logistical and practical co-operation between Benghazi and the western fighters in terms of supply and logistical support, but it is very difficult to get a sense of the degree of political co-operation,” said Henry Smith, a Libya-based analyst with the consulting group Control Risks.

Indeed, even the NTC seems barely united internally. That was evident recently when Mahmoud Jibril, the council’s executive chief, announced that the NTC would welcome a peace settlement with Col. Gadhafi; he was then contradicted by NTC spokesman Abdel-Hafidh Ghoga, who said that Col. Gadhafi would only be defeated militarily, and successfully pressed him to strike those remarks from the record. Several such schisms have occurred.

Beyond this, there is the larger question of just how much of anti-Gadhafi Libya the NTC actually represents. That became clear this week during an interview with Mohammed Musa El-Maghrabi, who represents the rebel fighters of the war-torn city of Brega in the NTC.

“While obviously we feel that the NTC is better than Gadhafi rule, they are only representing Benghazi – we do not have any sense of them representing Brega,” Mr. El-Maghraba said before meeting NTC leaders Thursday. “To us, it looks like the NTC is a foreign government, full of nepotism and corruption. This worries us. Do we want to have a Gadhafi dictatorship replaced with a Benghazi dictatorship?”

Brega may be an unusual case. Nevertheless, Mr. El-Maghrabi’s outburst does raise an eyebrow: If the NTC is unable to create a sense of legitimacy among the people of Brega, two hours down the road, then how on earth will it ever win the respect of Tripoli?

This is a question that has begun to worry foreign supporters, even as they give diplomatic backing to the NTC.

“They are much more adept at building legitimacy among European governments than they are at building legitimacy among the Libyan people,” said a European diplomat who works with the council.

The Nafusa problem

If Benghazi exposes the problem of unity, the Nafusa Mountains, where the rebel militias have perhaps the best chance of making an advance on Tripoli, offers the spectre of indiscipline.

In recent days the western rebels have been accused of multiple acts of arson and looting as they liberated villages here – apparent acts of anger at towns that had been loyal to Col. Gadhafi. As The New York Times found in its reporting there, the young rebels do not appear to be under much control by the more experienced officers, and their anger is not being kept in check.

Here is the most alarming spectacle of the Libyan endgame. Western Libya, where two-thirds of the country’s people live, is home to tens of thousands of families who prospered under Col. Gadhafi, and who are going to be frightened of any supposed liberating force that seems alien or hostile or bent on revenge. While there is little loyalty to the dictator’s ideas, if a rebel victory makes these people feel that their gains are threatened, those experienced with the region say they could well become an anti-government insurgency.

“The day that we worry about here,” a NATO military official said, “is the day that Gadhafi falls, which is the day that these kids have to stop being killers of Gadhafi supporters and start being protectors of Gadhafi supporters. I don’t know if they’re capable of making that change.”

The rebel military spokesman, Ahmed Omar Bani, dismissed such concerns in an interview, and waved away the idea of a detailed post-conflict training plan.

“We are different from the other Muslim countries,” he said, before offering a lengthy parable involving the Prophet Mohammed to suggest that Libyans would naturally be disinclined to take revenge. “We want to apply justice; we want to have fair trials. We are not going to become another Somalia.”

Nevertheless, in response to NATO concerns, the rebels have announced the creation of special forces supposedly meant to protect civilians and former loyalists after victory. This includes the Nafusa-based Tripoli Brigade, which is meant to contain soldiers who have family in Tripoli, including Canadian and American expatriates. But the brigade has rarely been seen, and there’s little to indicate that a march on Tripoli would be orderly.

A big part of the problem is that Tripoli is not Benghazi. Few of its citizens will miss Col. Gadhafi, but many will see rebel forces from outside the city as a threat to their quality of life. If they are not carefully and expensively kept comfortable and secure, the result could be an uprising.

“I think the possibility of Gadhafi loyalists becoming an insurgency is a factor seriously underestimated by Western governments,” said Mr. Smith. “I think they thought this was a regime that held on purely by coercion and lacked a constituency. I don’t see it all being through pure fear — I see some of t being through loyalty.”

At the moment, with the rebels caught in a seemingly endless stalemate on all three fronts, these all feel like remote problems. But however long this sad and unwanted war stretches out, most of the world’s concern will be focused on its final day.

Photo by Doug Saunders

Original Article

Tobruk, Libya

Ahmed Abdelrahmin is 15, but he is small for his age and his voice hasn’t changed. On Sunday, he sat patiently in the yard of a former high school in the east Libyan city of Tobruk as a Qatari instructor showed how to dismantle and clean a 50 mm anti-aircraft gun. Then he practised operating a battlefield radio set. In between, there was lots of marching.

Like all of the 350 young men around him, he volunteered to join the Libyan rebels, walking into their local headquarters with a uniform purchased by his father and a lunch packed by his mother. On Sunday, he was ready to complete a crash 30-day training program to prepare volunteers for the fight against Colonel Moammar Gadhafi’s much more well-prepared army.

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As Canada approaches its fifth month at war in Libya – participating in a multinational NATO air war to beat back Col. Gadhafi’s troops and protect the rebels – it is increasingly apparent how far this resistance movement has to go to become a fully capable army. While its political organization, headquartered in Benghazi, appears comparatively unified and purposeful, the combat operation is haphazard and woefully ill-supplied.

The scene inside the rebel camp on Sunday looked like a teen remake of The Dirty Dozen: A shambolic line of soldiers, many under 18 and at least three only 15, mixed with a scattering of older educated professionals of varying fitness, marched in haphazard order under the blazing sun, some wearing a mix of leftover, purchased or found uniforms, others in T-shirts and sneakers, with expressions of determined bravado. It was not so much West Point as Welcome Back, Kotter.

Yet this was graduation week. Equipped with pickup-truck rocket launchers jerry-built from Soviet aircraft parts and carrying battered AK-47 assault rifles, these young men, some barely able to tie their boots properly, will be sent to the front lines in Misrata and the hills of western Libya within 48 hours, where they will join the Tobruk branch of the Martyrs of the February 17 Revolution Brigade in its faltering push toward Tripoli.

Commanders say that very young boys like Mr. Abdelrahmin will not be sent to the front – combat is officially only for 18-year-olds, though ID checks are minimal – but instead will perform behind-the-lines duties in the mess hall or the communications office. Still, the rebels need all the bodies they can get.

Here at the training camp, meals are generally donated by the families of soldiers. Weapons are many decades old, none of them modern or accurate. Graduates are told that, as soldiers, they probably won’t be paid for at least a month and probably much longer, as the rebels currently have few sources of financing.

As a result, the anti-Gadhafi rebellion has not attracted anywhere close to all the fighting-age males in eastern Libya: Some of these young men said they know only a few friends who have been willing to fight.

The officers who run the training – a mix of soldiers donated by Qatar’s army and retired officers from Col. Gadhafi’s army who’ve joined the rebels – say they have compressed what is normally at least three months of basic training into 30 days.

“We’ve eliminated all the theoretical stuff – we just go straight into practical skills. We’ve made everything very short and very intense so they can survive in the battlefield,” says Altayib Al-Giryani, who oversees the training program.

Even this, he notes, is an improvement. In the early months, when the democracy protests against Col. Gadhafi turned into a fight for survival and then a mass armed movement to oust the dictator, the rebel army formed spontaneously, with young men hitchhiking to the front with little more than sunglasses and attitude.

“Even though this is very minimal, the fighters we are getting are actually better than those who had two years of training in the Gadhafi army,” Mr. Al-Giryani claims. “Those people were training because they were forced to, whereas these soldiers are coming here because they really want to fight for democracy in their country.”

Even to call it a single “rebel army” is to extrapolate. The Feb. 17 Brigade, one of the largest forces in the resistance, began as a private militia organized by oil and computer executives in eastern Libya to protect their resources from Col. Gadhafi’s revenge, until last month the rebel commanders in Benghazi made efforts to unite the various militias under a single set of rules and loyalties.

Given the extreme youth and inexperience of much of their elite fighters, the rebels have turned to foreign-born Libyans who have joined the fight from outside. In the country’s hilly west, along the border with Tunisia, the rebels have assembled brigades of well-educated Americans, Europeans and Canadians of Libyan descent.

These include the Tripoli Brigade, an elite force meant to drive the final assault on Tripoli – its emigrant members, all of them related to families living in the capital, are being trained to build trust, to protect the city from looting, and to protect the citizens and former regime officials from revenge killings by untrained amateur soldiers like those coming from camps like this one.

Photo: Doug Saunders

Original Article

London

The moment when the new politics of the Middle East first revealed its face may well have occurred three years ago when an Iranian Canadian found himself screaming in pain in a fluorescent-lit room shortly after his torturer had repeated, over and over, the angry demand: “Who is Pauly Shore?”

Maziar Bahari, the journalist and filmmaker who had come to Iran to cover the 2009 election, was halfway through his 118 days of solitary confinement in Tehran’s Evin prison when the Revolutionary Guards decided to devote a day of pain and humiliation to extracting as much information as possible about his links to the American B-movie comedian.

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Those links consisted of Mr. Bahari’s membership in the ironic Facebook group The Pauly Shore Alliance. The Guards’ senior elite had decided, using the espionage tool known as Google, that this must be some sort of Zionist spy ring. This became a small but brutal part of an elaborate attempt, by all appearances directed by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei himself, to use torture and intimidation to prove that the mass democracy uprisings that summer were the work of a small circle of foreign agents. Mr. Bahari was made out to be a linchpin of this plot, until it collapsed under the weight of its own absurdity.

Mr. Bahari’s ordeal, which he has chronicled in his moving and at times very funny book Then They Came for Me, is more than just a random event in Iran’s spiral from authoritarianism into totalitarianism. His arrest in June of 2009 was one of the first organized government responses to a wave of grassroots protest movements that would soon sweep across most of the Middle East and North Africa.

Because of Mr. Bahari’s superb personal knowledge of Iran’s government, he was able to produce an account of exactly how, and why, he was tormented, and the larger context of a fast-changing regime. It offers a number of lessons about the way Middle Eastern politics work.

Regimes will risk everything, including their own survival, to prove that their critics aren’t authentic. We can laugh at Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi’s claim that his country’s democracy movement was the product of Israeli-financed al-Qaeda agents putting LSD into the Nescafé of the nation’s youth. Or Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s claims that the thousands of people his forces are shooting or imprisoning are part of a conspiracy. But this marks their greatest point of weakness.

The Middle Eastern states were not born as Soviet-style totalitarian governments. They are mostly paternalistic regimes, built on the belief that a majority of the population will naturally be attracted to the great ideas and natural beneficence of the leader. Their legitimacy depends entirely on this sense of paternal respect.

If a sizable group of people become unhappy, they can’t be confronted as legitimate domestic voices, because that would undermine the regime’s raison d’être. So dissenters must be shown to be outsiders, or actually driven outside, or eliminated – even if this effort undermines legitimacy even further. This, as we’ve seen over and over again, can tear apart a regime.

Information is a grenade that’s hard to toss back over the wall. Iran’s Green uprisings were the first to use social media in a significant way. And their bloody aftermath marked the first time a regime used this technology aggressively in crushing protests. Bloggers had been locked up before, but Mr. Bahari was among the first in the region to be tortured on the basis of Facebook “likes.”

It’s become a cliché to say that free-flowing online information is good for democracy activists, but even better for spy agencies and the secret police. This is true to a point. But beyond monitoring people and locking them up, it’s actually much harder for authoritarian regimes to use this information to build support for their own cause: It looks forced, it looks fake, and it achieves the opposite of its intended effect.

So the only solution becomes the removal of all information. Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak managed to shut off the entire internet. Mr Gadhafi shut off mobile data services. This week, the Revolutionary Guards began raiding homes across Tehran and removing the near-ubiquitous backyard satellite dishes Iranians use to get foreign news. In the Guards’ newsletter Sobhe Sadegh this week, they explained why it is important to shut down free internet hotspots: Because “accessing information is the main and most important method used by the enemies of the establishment.”

These regimes prefer to respond with bold scripts and big-budget productions. But, as Mr. Bahari says, it resembles the making of Waterworld.

Original Article

Ventimiglia, Italy

Zied Guetari’s European journey began in the excitement of the Arab Spring, but it came to a crashing halt this week in the languid heat of an Italian summer.

The 24-year-old Tunisian, one of thousands of Arabs who have taken advantage of their countries’ new freedoms to cross the Mediterranean in makeshift boats since January, awoke Friday morning beneath a bench in a seaside park in Ventimiglia, his eighth day there. He washed his face in a drinking fountain, shared a stick of bread with a friend and joined a dozen other Arab men making the long walk to the edge of town, where Italy ends and France begins.

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There, they confronted something that most Europeans have not seen in at least 15 years: A border checkpoint, complete with gendarmes examining cars, stopping some to check passports, and sending back some of those, like Mr. Guetari, who look Arabic and don’t have papers. But after spending more than $1,200 on a perilous boat crossing, this son of fishermen, like so many of his countrymen, is determined to get to France – a determination that has led France to do the unthinkable and enforce its national border.

France and Italy, fearful of tens of thousands more people like Mr. Guetari if the Libyan war ends, Syria falls and other countries erupt, have opened a deep fissure in Europe’s tradition of border-free movement and continent-wide citizenship – a fissure that is expanding to other countries and may signal the end of a long-held convention.

It began in April when Italy, having received at least 20,000 Tunisian migrants on the remote island of Lampedusa (an estimated 2,000 have died trying to get there), abandoned efforts to repatriate them and gave them permission to stay – and, implicitly, to leave Italy for France. That led to a confrontation between France and Italy, and France’s decision to post police at long-abandoned crossings.

In the days since Mr. Guetari was herded off a train by police checking passports on board – another thing Europe hasn’t seen since the 1990s – and left in this border town on the Mediterranean coast, he has lingered first in a Red Cross shelter, until the mayor closed it down on Monday, and then in the park, joining thousands of young men who have tried to penetrate a border that didn’t exist three months ago.

Desperate, Mr. Guetari says he may give his last few hundred euros to one of the men at the train station offering to smuggle Arabs to France in vehicles – a suddenly thriving industry that also has not been seen inside Western Europe for many years.

France’s efforts to stop job-seeking North Africans, some 40,000 of whom have arrived in Europe since the Arab revolutions began in January, have only been partly successful. But they have left crowds of paperless migrants lingering in Italy, and forced places such as Ventimiglia to rediscover the old realities of being a border town.

And it has provoked a political crisis. Free movement between countries, long a foundation of Europe’s postwar peace, is suddenly facing its most serious challenges in a quarter-century. After the decision by France and Italy last month to temporarily suspend the Schengen Treaty – the 25-country pact, dating back to 1995, that eliminates all borders and passport requirements between member countries – the European Parliament will hold a debate later this month on whether to make it easier for countries to suspend Schengen and impose temporary controls.

Denmark this week introduced a proposal to put customs agents on its borders with Germany and Sweden. They would be allowed to inspect cars and boat passengers for illegal goods – a demand of the far-right Danish People’s Party, whose parliamentary votes are needed by governing coalition. That move, strictly illegal under Schengen, drew a furious response from Germany, one of the treaty’s most ardent defenders.

Likewise, in Switzerland this week the Schengen Treaty came under fire from right-wing parties in the legislature. And an effort to add Bulgaria and Romania to the Schengen Zone – after both EU countries beefed up their border security – was passed in the European Parliament this week but then vetoed by the leaders of EU countries wary of corruption in southeast Europe.

Before April, travellers had little way of knowing that they had crossed the borders between any of the 25 countries of the zone, which covers most of the continent. (Three EU countries, including Britain, are not members; three non-EU countries are members.) Now, some officials say, the whole pact could be in jeopardy.

“I think it’s a larger European move against open borders,” says Claude Moraes, a British Member of the European Parliament who is leading the campaign to protect the Schengen Treaty from political challenges.

In part, he said, Europe is facing political challenges from parties and voters that are less tolerant of immigration. Both France and Denmark will have tightly fought national elections in 2012, and the conservative government parties are eager to show that they’re tough on immigration.

But that hardly explains the larger crisis in the zone. As officials on both sides of the political debate note, there is a larger, more damaging flaw in the open-borders agreement: It should not be leaving people like Mr. Guetari wandering stateless across Europe, and it should not leave countries fighting to prevent each other’s unwanted arrivals from crossing their frontiers.

After all, the Arab Spring is not exactly a major immigration crisis, and security provisions under the Schengen Treaty should have made it easy to handle.

“The numbers involved are actually very small, about 40,000 in total reaching Europe so far this year, which is not an emergency compared to the hundreds of thousands we saw during the Yugoslav wars, or even compared to the 900,000 who have fled Libya so far this year,” says Jean-Philippe Chauzy of the Geneva-based International Organization for Migration, an intergovernmental body that monitors human movement.

The IOM has noted that almost none of the migrants arriving as a result of the Arab Spring are claiming to be refugees – and therefore should be repatriated by member states, or given legitimate immigrant status.

“The Kosovo crisis, that was a refugee crisis – but most of the Libyans and Tunisians are migrant workers who want to return home after earning some money – they don’t even pretend to be seeking asylum.”

Under the terms of the 1990s agreements, people like Mr. Guetari should not even have reached Ventimiglia. The Schengen agreement was built on a compromise: In order to have completely open borders within Europe, there would have to be very tight and well-enforced ones outside. European governments all promised to harmonize their immigration policies, their refugee policies, and their enforcement systems, so migrants wouldn’t be able to enter through weak points and wander at will through 25 countries, or head for the country believed to have the best odds for refugees (France has historically been among the most open countries for refugees, and Italy and Greece among the least).

But that harmonization never happened. The agreement to create a common external European border has been postponed to 2012, and few believe it will actually happen.

Instead, frontier countries such as Spain and Italy struck deals with the strongmen who ruled the North African countries across the sea: Their regimes would police the beaches aggressively, preventing anyone from leaving, and they’d accept anyone deported back. They were paid generously for such agreements.

With the collapse of Arab autocracies this year, these deals are off, the Mediterranean beaches are open to anyone who wants to cross, and Europe is forced to confront its lack of a co-ordinated immigration policy – and the likely weakening of the Schengen Treaty.

“It’s not going to be destroyed entirely, for the simple reason that Schengen has a powerful economic function, and cultural and symbolic meaning for Europe. The governments are not going to allow it to be completely killed – what you will find is countries continuing to find opportunistic reasons to impose border checks, over and over.”

Here on the edge of Italy, that means that places like Ventimiglia are once again learning, after almost two decades of peace, to become frontier towns – with all the smuggling, the heavy police presence, and the lost souls that that implies.

“We really were not prepared to deal with this, and it has been a lot of work,” says Fiamma Cogliolo of the town’s Red Cross, which fed and housed more than 1,300 Tunisians until the shelter was shut down. “We had to learn a different way of operating.”

That may prove true across the continent.

Original Article

Toronto

For more than 20 years it was possible to find Idi Amin in the supermarkets of Jeddah, the former Ugandan dictator and murderer of hundreds of thousands wandering the aisles of a Saudi Safeway and loading his shopping cart with frozen fish and yogurt cups.

That life of domestic banality looked to many like a gross injustice: Here was one of the greatest criminals of our age, responsible for plunging a once-thriving nation into misery, torture, systematic killing and mass expulsion, left to have the sort of natural death that had been denied his mutilated victims.

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In normal human terms, it was an injustice. Reed Brody, the chief lawyer for Human Rights Watch, at the time described the formula: “If you kill one person, you go to jail; if you kill 20, you go to an institution for the insane; if you kill 20,000, you get political asylum.” But this was not a normal justice situation. By putting one man beyond justice, it may have prevented a great injustice to many: Uganda was freed from Idi Amin. Hundreds of thousands more deaths, and a prolonged and desperate war, may have been prevented by providing him this escape.

His flight had been facilitated by his old backer and ally Moammar Gadhafi, who today is himself at the centre of elaborate attempts to arrange a similar exile.

Whether Colonel Gadhafi and his sons are participating in these attempts is a matter of speculation, but leaders of the United States, Britain and other countries would prefer Libya’s revolution ended the way Tunisia’s did next door: with the departure of dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali to Jeddah, and a fairly bloodless transition to democracy.

Persuading Col. Gadhafi to flee Libya would save thousands of lives. It would end the conflict almost immediately, because there is no basis for support of the regime other than the man himself.

But there’s a problem with ending the conflict this way: Justice stands in the way.

When the United Nations Security Council unanimously agreed to take action to stop Col. Gadhafi’s killings by passing Resolution 1970 on Feb. 26, it added clauses that refer the Libyan government’s crimes against humanity to the International Criminal Court in the Hague - and the court responded by declaring, with the backing of Canada and other countries, that they would investigate Col. Gadhafi and his sons and prepare prosecutions.

It was considered a historic moment, because the U.S., which has not previously recognized the international court, backed its jurisdiction over Libya (which also doesn’t recognize the court). War-crimes trials against sitting leaders are rare and difficult.

But this created a dilemma that has become tragically familiar in recent years: By applying the pressure of justice to a savage leader, the ICC may have perpetuated, rather than ended, his crimes: Col. Gadhafi and his sons and generals dare not end their campaign of violence if it means spending years in a Dutch cell followed by a possible execution.

“I have heard people say that Resolution 1970 was a mistake because it gives Gadhafi no way out,” international law scholar Malcolm Shaw told the Guardian. “It basically said to Gadhafi, ‘You have to fight to the end.’ “

We’ve seen this before. In 2008, it appeared that Robert Mugabe was ready to step down as President of Zimbabwe, after faring poorly in an election and facing international condemnation for his abuses. But his generals, terrified of facing a certain ICC indictment out of power, turned on him and persuaded him to stay.

“The Old Man is staying,” one of Mr. Mugabe’s lieutenants told my colleague Stephanie Nolen, “because I’m not ending up in the Hague.” And indeed he stayed.

This is an unfortunate pattern: Atrocities are committed, the ICC steps in and begins investigating, and prospects for a quick surrender or retirement disappear. This has happened in the Congo, in Sudan, and, most tragically, in Uganda, where an ICC prosecution provoked the horrific Lord’s Resistance Army to abandon its ceasefire and continue killing - and the government to launch a bloody campaign of reprisals.

Approaching its 10th anniversary next year, the ICC has things to celebrate - it has brought heads of state to justice, most notably Liberia’s Charles Taylor, who was prosecuted in a special independent court on the ICC’s facilities. But it may have caused more injustices than it has prevented, and tragically, its successes - notably Mr. Taylor’s trial - have been the root cause of the ICC’s role in prolonging dictatorial rule.

The solution for Col. Gadhafi, short of waiting until he dies, may well involve the dark paradox of countries most supportive of the ICC agreeing to smuggle him out to a country that does not honour or recognize its jurisdiction. On Wednesday, in a cosmic twist of fate, Uganda offered itself up.

For a more detailed scholarly take on this column’s argument, read this paper by genocide-law specialist Jeffrey Bernstein

Original Article