- Qaddafi was not killed for humanitarian purposes but for the oil and for money. His ideas of an African gold-backed currency were his major undoing.
The recent Hillary
Clinton email leaks have opened a can of worms everywhere
including in Africa.
Wikileaks released an unclassified U.S. Department of State document emailed
to Clinton, dated April 2, 2011. Sidney Blumenthal, the sender of the email
confirmed what the world already suspected. Qaddafi was not killed for
humanitarian purposes but for the oil and for money.
His idea of an African
gold-backed currency were his major undoing.
“Reconstruction now means (Ivory Coast), it now means Southern
Sudan, it means Liberia, it means Sri Lanka, I hope it will mean Libya,” he
said.
To the ordinary person, this was the World Bank hoping to come in
to help a failing state but to Economist John Perkins, the World Bank was not to
be considered as fulfilling its supposed mandate. It was in actual fact a U.S.
bank together with its sibling, the IMF.
The United States controls about 16% of the World Bank while the
second largest member, Japan has a paltry 7%. The United States again has around
17% voting rights in the International Monetary Fund. His point was that these
institutions were and still are extensions of the Western foreign policy.
“So, we might ask
ourselves: What happens when a “rogue” country threatens to bring the banking
system that benefits the corporatocracy to its knees?” he asked later saying
the Western empire has a standing army (NATO) to violently protect its
position.
Libya was the “rogue”
nation but the question is: Just what did Gaddafi have in mind?
According to the IMF,
Libya’s Central Bank is 100% state owned and in 2011, it was estimated to have
144 tons of gold in its vaults. Muammar Gaddafi’s plan was to introduce a
gold-backed currency which he hoped African and Muslim nations would adopt.
He felt it could rival
the euro and the dollar, and rightly so too.
Sidney Blumenthal, in his email to Hillary Clinton confirmed,
“Qaddafi's government holds 143 tons of gold, and a similar amount in silver.
During late March, 2011 these stocks were moved to SABHA (south west in the
direction of the Libyan border with Niger and Chad); taken from the vaults of
the Libyan Central Bank in Tripoli.”
He went on to say the
gold and silver was valued at $7 billion and was one of the reasons Nicolas
Sarkozy embarked on a French attack of Libya.
“Sarkozy's plans are
driven by the following issues:
a. A desire to gain a greater share of Libya oil
production,
b. Increase French influence in North Africa,
c. Improve his internal political situation in
France,
d. Provide the French military with an
opportunity to reassert its position in the world,
e. Address the concern of his advisors over
Qaddafi's long term plans to supplant France as the dominant power
in, Francophone Africa,” wrote Blumenthal.
If Qaddafi had
succeeded, the United States of America and Europe would have been
forced to buy oil and
minerals in the gold backed currency thus tipping the scales.
This was a horror the
West dared not experience. The situation would have been a more lethal
re-enactment of Saddam Hussein’s currency wars when he supported the new Euro currency at the expense of the
United States Dollar.
At this point, the U.S.
was highly insecure about the effects of the new currency to its economy.
Hussein’s decision to sell oil in the then new currency was a blow to the U.S.
worsened by the proclamation that the dollar was the “currency of the enemy”.
Currency wars have therefore been a fact of history with the Hussein situation
being a peculiar intra-Western conflict that culminated in the Middle East
instability promulgated by U.S. interventionist policies.
That Qaddafi would be
killed for planning to introduce an African currency to the fray is not
surprising but that does not make it acceptable.
The leaked Clinton email
has far-reaching implications on the fluid state of post-colonial relations
with the West. If anything, it is an eye-opener. Where Africa seeks to build an
independent economic structure, the West is seen to try and derail those plans
so as to retain its primacy in world affairs.
With regard to the
creation of a new currency, Ministry of Peace Founder, Dr
James Thring said, “It’s one of those things that you have to plan
almost in secret, because as soon as you say you’re going to change over from
the dollar to something else, you’re going to be targeted.”
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