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On March 24, I called attention here to the fact that Muammar Qaddafi was still making use of NileSat to broadcast the fiendish propaganda of Libyan State TV.

It seems that he’s still doing it. Recently, a Libyan firm of six lawyers has accused the regime’s Al-Jamahiriya TV and Al-Jamahiriya 2 of inciting hate and violence. The lawyers are trying to force Egyptian satellite network Nilesat to remove the regime’s channels.

At the same time, NileSat refuses to carry broadcasts by “Libya for the Free,” which was created in March to offer an alternative to state-controlled Libyan television, even though the Qatar-based channel had paid the full fees:

“But when we inquired the company said the decision to suspend the broadcast was a political one,” said Mahmoud Shammam, media director for the Transitional National Council in Benghazi.  “The phone calls and email we receive from fans prove that we have decent viewership inside Libya, but that could be expanded if we have access to Nilesat satellite,” Shammam said.

Meanwhile, there’s no sign that the United States has used any of its influence with Egypt to try to change this situation.

It appears that Libyan State Television is dependent on four international satellite providers (ArabSat, EutelSat, AsiaSat, and, especially, NileSat) to carry Muammar Gaddafi’s three state TV channels—particularly the Jamahiriya satellite channel, which has reportedly been used to transmit coded messages to Gaddafi’s mercenaries and security forces.

That includes all of “the Leader’s” threatening broadcasts, as well as those of Dr. Seif Al-Islam Gaddafi. It also includes the official state television version of Gaddafi’s latest hit song, “Zenga, Zenga,” which includes hired demonstrators repeating Gaddafi’s rant about searching out and destroying his enemies, “alley by alley, house by house, room by room,” to the tune of cheerful music and the waving of flags.

In a Sky News interview today with Adam Boulton, I suggested jamming Gaddafi’s broadcasts, but it might be much easier (and not require use of any special assets) to simply get NileSat and the others to turn him off. When Hosni Mubarak was still in power, on January 30, NileSat stopped carrying Al Jazeera on the instruction of the Egyptian government.

Why isn’t the U.S. administration pushing this? Moreover, why isn’t it helping the opposition to set up their own effective broadcasting? Oh well, I guess we know the answer to those questions.

There are a number of websites where you can sign petitions, either to the satellite providers or to the Obama administration, to support such courses of action, including here, here, or here.

CBS News claims to have a copy of the draft resolution establishing a no-fly zone that was the subject of deliberations at the United Nations yesterday. If that is indeed the resolution, then it repeats the language of UNSCR 1970, which established the arms embargo and has been interpreted by the State Department as applying to both sides.  A lawyer might argue that this is not the case, since the embargo applies to the “Libyan Arab Jamahiriyah,” Muammar Qadhafi’s invented term to describe his government. But since the resolution refers quite clearly to the “Qadhafi regime” where it wants to, and uses “Libyan Arab Jamahiriyah” as a place or location, the embargo certainly appears to apply to the country and not just the regime (although most Libyans would surely say that their country is “Libya” and not Qadhafi’s “Jamahiriyah.”)

By precluding the type of assistance that might be most helpful for the new Transitional National Council, this supposedly “even-handed” embargo—which in any case will not stop Algeria or Syria or others who are thinking of supplying Qadhafi with arms, munitions, or fuel for his forces—greatly increases the risk that a no-fly zone will produce one or both of the two least desirable outcomes of such an initiative. Either the international community flies uselessly overhead while Qadhafi’s forces continue the slaughter on the ground—like what happened in 1995 at Srebrenica in Bosnia—or American planes spend months or years boring useless holes in the sky while a stalemate continues on ground.

It would be a simple matter to fix the language of paragraph nine of the original resolution:

9.   Decides that all Member States shall immediately take the necessary measures to prevent the direct or indirect supply, sale or transfer to the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya Qadhafi regime, from or through their territories or by their nationals, or using their flag vessels or aircraft, of arms and related materiel of all types, including weapons and ammunition, military vehicles and equipment, paramilitary equipment, and spare parts for the aforementioned, and technical assistance, training, financial or other assistance, related to military activities or the provision, maintenance or use of any arms and related materiel, including the provision of armed mercenary personnel whether or not originating in their territories…

Since we do not yet know what opposition forces might need nor what we might want to provide them, there is no reason to impose a prohibition in advance on whatever we might later want to do.

The no-fly zone resolution should also be written so that it applies only to flights by Qadhafi’s forces, not to the whole territory of the “Libyan Arab Jamahiriyah,” as the reported draft text does.

UPDATE: I’ve received assurances from a senior official in the administration that they understand the problem and are working to fix it. In any case, I was assured, the U.S. interpretation is that the embargo applies only to the Qadhafi regime and they will be clear about this.

This is very different—and a great improvement—from the position taken last week by then‑State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley, who said that the embargo applied to the territory of Libya and not just the Qadhafi regime, and that it would be “illegal” for the United States to provide military assistance to the opposition forces.

It will still be unfortunate if the language remains unchanged and some countries who might otherwise help refuse to do so based on their interpretation of the language. But at least the United States will apparently not have its hands tied.

If the language isn’t changed, then the U.S. Explanation of Vote should at least make it clear that the United States interprets the embargo as applying only to the Qadhafi regime, to clear up the confusion created by the State Department spokesman last week.

Portugal has now joined France in recognizing the national council in Benghazi as the government of Libya. The Guardian reports that France will now send a French ambassador to Benghazi and receive a Libyan envoy in Paris. Two Libyan National Council representatives, Mahmoud Jibril and Ali Essaoui, have been to Paris and met with President Nicolas Sarkozy.

The six Arab countries that make up the Gulf Cooperation Council, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, have called publicly for a “no-fly zone” to support the Libyan opposition. And the head of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) on Tuesday called on the United Nations to enforce a no-fly zone over Libya, while rejecting any intervention on the ground: “We join our voice to the voices asking for a no-fly zone in Libya, and we call on the Security Council to do its duty in this regard,” Secretary-General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu told an emergency meeting of the OIC in Saudi Arabia.

Perhaps all the U.S. hesitation about all the “complications” of derecognizing the Qaddafi regime and recognizing the national council had the unintended consequence of encouraging others to step forward. But now the administration should not delay further in recognizing the national council and sending a senior diplomat to Benghazi. This would be a powerful instrument of “soft power,” sending a message to those still clinging to Muammar Qaddafi that they are fighting for a losing cause. The faster his cronies desert him, the sooner this tragedy will end. And the better the condition of the country will be in the aftermath, as well as the prestige of the United States in Libya and throughout the Arab world.

The immediate next question will be how to respond to requests by the new government for support of various kinds, including supplies, communications, and arms. Next comes the question of a no-fly zone. But the urgent step is to recognize the new government, which should be done with no further delay.

(Not so incidentally, this would also end the hand-wringing that “we have no idea what might replace Qaddafi.” It is long past time for us to find people we can talk with instead of the Qaddafi family.)

Apparently the U.S. still recognizes the Qaddafi regime as the government of Libya, even while saying that Qaddafi is “delusional” and must step down. When the Libyan ambassador here resigned, it seems that the State Department immediately recognized his deputy as the charge d’affaires and the Qaddafi flag continues to be displayed in the Libyan Embassy in Washington, rather than the “Independence Flag” which flies over all the liberated areas of Libya.

This makes no sense. If it reflects a thought that we need to keep lines of communication open to Muammar Qaddafi and his clique in order to encourage a peaceful resolution of this tragedy, there are many ways to do that without continuing to recognize it as a government and treating the Embassy here as their sovereign possession.

Perhaps some legal types at the State Department are just mechanically following procedures. But the consequences are serious. We should be making every effort to communicate with the new provisional authorities in Benghazi and elsewhere and moving as quickly as possible toward recognizing a provisional government of free Libya. Continuing to recognize the Qaddafi regime is an obstacle to doing that.

The administration should be pressed to go beyond vague declarations that they are in touch with elements in the country and take steps to formalize the channels of communication, to include sending an envoy to Benghazi and to other liberated cities where conditions are stable.

Image by U.S. Navy.

According to the fact sheet posted at the website of the U.S. Mission to the UN (curiously, the actual text is not yet available at either the websites of the UN, the State Department, or USUN), Security Council Resolution 1970, among other provisions, imposes:

– An arms embargo and other arms restrictions.

– All states are prohibited to provide any kind of arms to Libya.

– All states are prohibited from allowing the transit to Libya of mercenaries.

– Libya is prohibited from exporting any arms to any other state.

– States are called upon to inspect suspicious cargo that may contain arms. When such arms are found, states are required to seize and dispose of them.

From this summary it would seem that the resolution makes no distinction between the Qaddafi regime and its opponents, including the newly declared Provisional Government. That would make illegal under international law precisely the kind of assistance that the anti-Qaddafi forces most need at this moment.

No one who is thinking of supplying Qaddafi with arms at this point is going to care about what a UN resolution says. So this provision has no effect on Qaddafi now, though it might have sent a useful signal a week earlier.

However, the United States and other countries who might supply the rebels may not be able to legally do so until the resolution is changed. This will cause further delay and put weight on the side of those who are probably arguing that supplying arms to anyone would represent too much U.S. involvement.

If that sounds absurd, it is exactly what the United States and the “international community” did at the outset of the war in Bosnia 19 years ago. The embargo on the Bosnians remained in effect for years, depriving them of the means to defend themselves, with the argument advanced that supplying arms to either side would simply prolong the war. In fact, what prolonged the war was the weakness of the Bosnians. By depriving them of the means to defend themselves, the arms embargo caused tens of thousands of deaths and eventually required the United States to intervene militarily, deploying tens of thousands of American troops over the course of a decade. It left the government of Bosnia permanently shattered and strengthened radical influences, including foreign Islamist extremists, in Bosnian politics.

Let’s hope the text is different than the summary. If not, an urgent effort needs to be made to revise the provision.

Image by Javier Carbajal.

The international community—to include the Obama administration—that is so concerned about the United States acting “unilaterally,” waits four days before even holding a meeting of the Security Council, while the Libyan people cry out desperately for help. Multilateral action takes much longer, so it should be organized earlier. The UN Security Council needs to  do more today than just pass hortatory resolutions or impose sanctions that will have no immediate effect.

In a small vignette of what is happening in Libya: after Qaddafi’s chief of protocol came out against the regime, his house was raided and his daughter, the mother of three children, was seized and disappeared.

From everything we can tell, Saif al-Islam Qaddafi was serious when he warned that Libya would go back to the stone age, that the regime would fight to the last bullet and there would be nothing left. The regime seems determined to destroy the country before it goes down.

More public statements, or even the imposition of sanctions, are of absolutely no use at this point. Much more urgent action is needed. The United States should be seeking U.N. approval for:

— Recognition of a provisional authority in liberated areas (or even a Provisional Government of Free Libya if the Libyans can organize a credible one), initially in Benghazi in the east and Misurata in the west, which seem to be liberated, although are still under threat of air attack;

— Provision by member countries, including specifically Egypt and Tunisia, of any support requested by these provisional authorities;

— Imposition of a NATO-supported “no fly” zone over Libya to halt further bombing by Qaddafi’s forces;

— Urgent supply of food and medical supplies to any point in Libya that is accessible by road or by military transport aircraft;

— Provision of arms to the provisional authorities.

When there are so many things that could be done to help the unbelievably brave Libyan people—without any risk to American lives—it is shameful to be sitting on our hands. If that is not reason enough to act, then we should be thinking about the terrible reputation the United States is acquiring, by its inaction, among the Libyan people and throughout the region. It will stay with us for a long time.

Image by Tedeytan.

The situation in Bahrain has taken a turn for the better. The army has been called off the streets. In an apparent victory over the king’s uncle, Prince Khalifa—the long-serving hard-line prime minister—Crown Prince Salman has been asked by King Hamad to start a national dialogue “with all parties.”

The Obama administration may have helped to tip the balance in Bahrain by putting its weight on the side of restraint. But it should not equate the situations in Bahrain and Libya as the president seemed to do today in a statement urging the governments of Bahrain, Libya, and Yemen to “show restraint and respect the rights of their people.” Instead, the United States should be calling for an end to the Qaddafi regime.

The communications blackout imposed by the regime makes it difficult to know what is going on in Libya, but the 84 confirmed dead reported by Human Rights Watch is probably a conservative estimate. In a powerful conversation with Al Jazeera, an unidentified resident of Benghazi pleads desperately for help: “It’s not a war, it’s a big, big massacre  . . . They don’t care about us. They can destroy us completely.” Professor Abdel Rahman Al-Swaihlee, an incredibly brave university professor from Misurata, said there is no turning back and called for an end to the regime.

This could be a turning point in the tyrannical rule of Muammar Qaddafi. Either this crack in the wall of fear that has imprisoned Libyans for four decades will open wide, or Qaddafi will succeed with his goons and mercenaries in crushing the rebellion and condemning the Libyan people to more decades of subjugation.

The administration should speak with a strong voice about the need for an end to the regime of terror in Libya. And it should back that up with actions, including suspending ambassadorial-level relations; pursuing all possible means to break through the information blockade that prevents Libyans from communicating with one another or with the outside world; and mobilizing international support for the tormented Libyan people.

Qaddafi will not change—he will do whatever he can to stay in power—but international support can embolden the brave people who are resisting him and give pause to those doing his dirty work. There are risks in acting boldly, but there are risks in continuing to temporize. By next week—or even tomorrow—it may be too late to make a difference.

Image by Open Democracy.

Nehad Abul Komsan, an Egyptian lawyer and founder of the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights, has an excellent article in the Washington Post today in which she describes Egypt’s peaceful revolution as having “brought down a wall of fear whose fall is as important for Egypt and this region as the fall of the Berlin Wall was for Europe.”

“With the fall of the Mubarak regime,” she argues:

there is no longer any reason for delay. The road is now clear for the Supreme Military Council to fulfill its promise of responding to the will of the people by ending the state of emergency; freeing all prisoners of opinion; and investigating those in the security forces who were responsible for setting criminals free from jails while keeping political prisoners in their cells along with newly arrested young revolutionaries. Other immediate measures include restoring basic rights, such as that of political parties to assemble and organize, and dissolving the People’s Assembly and the Shura (Consultative) Council, which are the products of rigged elections.

Rather than “making minor changes” to the existing constitution—“a document that was altered in 1971 to grant then-President Anwar Sadat his nearly pharaoh-like powers”—or bringing in some self-appointed “wise men” to draft a new one, she argues that Egypt should start with the 1954 draft constitution. That draft was prepared after the 1952 revolution set aside the 1923 constitution. But Gamal Abdel Nasser and his “Free Officers” set aside the 1954 draft, “claiming that the revolution provided all the legitimacy [they] needed. When it did this, the regime abandoned the promise of democracy, one of the most important symbols of the 1952 revolution. The constitutional provisions for freedoms, genuine elections, and political and economic rights had since been abandoned as well.”

It’s also worth checking out an article she wrote three years ago, “Women’s Testimony—A Problem with the Female Mind or the Egyptian Mind?” which criticizes the Egyptian application of Sharia that treats a woman’s testimony as worth only half that of a man:

In Egypt women serve as judges and in the Cabinet, yet their testimony only counts for half of a man’s testimony.

Other than fundamental tenets, some religious rules are changeable and open to interpretation, the best example of which is Omar bin Al-Khattab who was well-known for his equity and wisdom when he abolished a number of the Qur’anic judgments, most famously the penalties, such as cutting the hand of the hungry thief. Legal systems worldwide have settled on the abolishment of slavery, except the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, by reinterpreting the verses pertaining to punishments like cutting off the hand of the thief and stoning the adulteress. It is well established that with the development of legal systems and criminal reform, it is impossible to deal with the Qur’anic verses by reading the texts without understanding their purpose and context.

She has her own blog which includes this comment on Egypt’s recent revolution:

We may know the joy of graduation day, the first day at work at the first job, wedding day, or seeing a face of the first baby, but the joy of freedom cannot be known except by those who were deprived of it. Finally, Egypt knew the joy of freedom

Now, we have a hard and long work to preserve Egypt.

Image by Ahmad Hammoud.

Google executive Wael Ghonim gave a remarkable interview shortly after his release from prison. Ghonim’s Facebook group “We Are All Khaled Said” (referring to an activist who was beaten to death by police in Alexandria because he knew of corrupt police activity) helped to spark the January 25 protests. He was abducted by security forces and held incommunicado for 12 days. Along with many very emotional moments, the post-prison interview is extraordinary for the vehemence of Ghonim’s denials that the protesters are foreign agents, his rejection of any hero status for himself, the graciousness with which he describes his interrogators, his description of his encounter with the new NDP head Hossam Badrawi, his rejection of retribution and score settling, and his emotional reaction to seeing pictures of protesters who were killed. The interviewer, Mona Al-Shazly, is impressive herself.

The 50-minute interview is in five parts, with English subtitles: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5.

The WSJ reports:

Chinese authorities have blocked the word “Egypt” from searches on Twitter-like microblogging sites in an indication of concern among Communist Party leaders that the unrest there could encourage similar calls for political reform in China.

Internet censors also appeared Sunday to have deleted almost all of the comments posted beneath the few limited reports on the unrest—mostly from the state-run Xinhua news agency—that have been published on Chinese news sites in the past few days.

The strict online controls illustrate the party’s concern that the Internet is providing China’s citizens with a new means of information and organization that could challenge its monopoly on power, as has happened with other authoritarian governments in recent years.

Any predictions about the future of China need to take account of the fact that the regime in Beijing is still very afraid of its own people. There has been a great expansion of personal freedom in China over the last 30 years, but very little increase in political openness. The country could benefit from a gradual liberalization—just as Egypt could have—but the leadership finds it very difficult to do.

It might have been different. In both Tunisia and Egypt, the United States could have pushed actively for gradual reforms, such as the development of legitimate political parties, credible legal institutions and free elections, and curtailing First Family cronyism. That might have averted the present crisis and allowed leaders and institutions to emerge that could manage a stable transition after the departure of the dictators. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and ex-Tunisian leader Zine El Abidine Ben Ali might well have resisted, but at least the United States would now be perceived as having been on the side of freedom.

President George W. Bush, to his credit, was the first U.S. president to speak openly and critically about the mistaken tendency of U.S. policy in the Middle East to favor stability over freedom and wind up with neither. In Egypt today we are seeing the accuracy of that analysis. But translating that analysis into effective policy was difficult.

Despite some strong initial steps, by the second year of his second term Bush had retreated substantially, a retreat symbolized by the case of Ayman Nour, a Christian and a liberal democrat whom the Bush administration had previously defended strongly. When Mubarak jailed him in late 2005, our ambassador in Cairo at the time could not even respond to an Egyptian student’s request for the American position, going on instead about the “complexity of this case” and saying “the important question is not what do Americans think about this and what it means for Egyptian democracy, but what do Egyptians think.”

With Ben Ali, the United States spoke softly about the need for a free press and political reform, but the Tunisian dictator also felt no real pressure when he ignored that quiet diplomacy. Ironically, there was even less pressure on the dictators in Libya, Syria, and Iran.

Although President Obama came into office amid much talk about boosting American “soft power,” there was an almost complete abandonment of active support for freedom and democratic values, not only in the Middle East but in Asia and Latin America, as well. Funding for democracy support programs was cut. And when courageous Iranians took to the streets to protest their theocratic tyranny, the Obama administration remained largely silent and inactive.

We can’t redo the past, but we can begin to make up for lost time. We are lucky that the extraordinary dramas in Egypt and Tunisia, unlike the Iranian revolution three decades ago, seem to have caught the Islamist organizations by surprise and, so far, the demonstrators in Egypt are not asking to replace a secular tyranny with an Islamist one. There is much that can yet go wrong, but that is all the more reason the United States needs to play an active role on behalf of freedom, because freedom’s enemies are certainly going to be active on the other side.