And The Battle Rages On...
Colonel Muammar Gaddafi is clinging on to power by all means necessary. Now, the West has intervened. Hot Press spoke to several Libyans living in Ireland and sought their views...
Valerie Flynn, 29 Mar 2011
Five weeks after the first civilian demonstrators took to the streets in Libya, dictator Muammar Gaddafi seems prepared to fight to the bitter end to defend his 42-year regime. Hot Press spoke to eye-witnesses to the terrible conflict on the ground in Libya.
The wave of social and political unrest that has swept the Arab world since December took observers across the globe by surprise. To the outside world, the regimes of Ben Ali in Tunisia or Hosni Mubarak in Egypt appeared secure, the people of the region obedient. The sudden outbreak of demands for democracy and the toppling of these rulers has seemed, to the West, to come from nowhere.
Thus, while in Egypt and Tunisia, unpopular governments tumbled within weeks, the popular uprising in Libya has been met with the bloodiest of clampdowns. The dictator Colonel Gaddafi has so far stalled the attempted revolution in Libya, leaving the country trapped in a dangerous stalemate. The National Interim Council, the political face of the uprising, controls the western half of the country, centred on the city of Benghazi. But from his eastern stronghold – the capital city, Tripoli – Gaddafi holds the rest of the country in an iron grip. As the conflict intensifies, the death toll is now believed to be in the thousands and rising rapidly.
It is against this backdrop that Western powers, specifically France, Britain and the US, have decided to intervene. Fighter planes from these and other countries are providing air support to the rebels, bombing Gaddafi’s military bases, including the compound where he lives. Meanwhile, French aircraft are preventing Gaddafi’s forces from approaching the rebel stronghold of Benghazi.
It was in Benghazi that the Libyan demonstrations began on February 15. At first, the demonstrators numbered only in their hundreds but within days, thousands were on the streets.
Dr Idris Founas, a medical doctor living in Ireland, was in Benghazi for his father’s funeral when the first large-scale protest took place on February 17. The crackdown by Gaddafi’s forces against the Libya-wide ‘Day of Revolt’ was brutal.
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