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Citizens Electoral Council of Australia

Media Release  Thursday, 30 April 2015

Craig Isherwood‚ National Secretary
PO Box 376‚ COBURG‚ VIC 3058
Phone: 1800 636 432
Email: cec@cecaust.com.au
Website: http://cec.cecaust.com.au
 

Mass murder in the Mediterranean—while Tony Abbott cheers

In one of the largest shipwrecks in modern times, on 19 April an estimated 800 African migrants died in Libyan territorial waters while fleeing en route to Europe. This followed 400 deaths on 12 April after another migrant boat capsized in the same waters. Since the start of 2014 reports the Los Angeles Times, there have been about 4,400 boat deaths of migrants coming from Libya—with 900 so far in 2015 even before the latest incident. The Geneva-based International Organization for Migration says that at the current rate as many as 30,000 migrants will drown before year’s end—ten times the figure for 2014.

From October 2013 to November 2014, the nation of Italy—the main target of those fleeing North Africa—had conducted a humanitarian rescue program named “Mare Nostrum” (Latin for “Our Sea”, the Roman name for the Mediterranean), which had saved over 140,000 migrants. But after European Union countries ignored Italy’s request for funding assistance for Mare Nostrum last November it was replaced with the smaller, EU-funded “Operation Triton”, a border patrol mission within EU territorial waters. The UK government led the opposition to a search and rescue program for refugees, arguing that saving lives attracts more refugees; in an effort to save face following the tragedy that they caused by scrapping Mare Nostrum, the EU have now tripled funding for Operation Triton’s border control measures, not search and rescue, and British PM David Cameron has proposed to send a UK warship to the Mediterranean to participate. The beefed up Operation Triton will be combined with an aggressive repatriation program to send refugees back to the crises they are fleeing. Tony Abbott, whose anti-refugee policy the UK government explicitly channelled to oppose the search and rescue operation that would have saved these refugees, cheered the tougher measures, intoning—as usual—“stop the boats”.

Explicitly or implicitly, western news media have usually framed the debate around these horrific drownings in the following terms: “How can the EU conceivably let all these poor people in? They will just put a huge strain on the already groaning social services budgets of EU nations and cause more competition for jobs in nations with skyrocketing unemployment.” Such a rigged “debate” ignores the ugly realities which have caused this present crisis. These include:

FACT: The immediate cause for the present mass emigration from Libya was the US/British/French military overthrow and murder of Libyan head of state Muammar Qaddafi in 2011, done in explicit violation of international law. The fig leaf cover for their action was a vaguely-worded resolution which they had rammed through the UN Security Council with the ostensible purpose of averting a “humanitarian disaster” allegedly being planned by Qaddafi against his opponents in the Libyan city of Benghazi.

FACT: The militias in Benghazi “saved” by US, UK, and French bombers and Special Forces were precisely those who had since 2003 sent a greater proportion of foreign jihadis to fight US forces in Iraq than any other region in North Africa or the Middle East.

FACT: The Qaddafi assassination and accompanying “regime change” turned the former state of Libya into the fountainhead of terrorism for all of North Africa, the Sahel, and even Syria. The Muslim Brotherhood/Al-Qaeda-allied forces whom Obama and Cameron “saved” in Benghazi, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), went on to spawn or ally with other militias in chaotic Libya, murdering Americans at the Benghazi consulate in 2012; setting up terror training bases in the south and east of the country; and running weapons to Syria and Iraq. And after Libyans elected a representative, non-terrorist national government in 2014, the LIFG and Muslim Brotherhood took over Tripoli, the nation’s capital, and forced the elected government to flee to Tobruk near the Egyptian border. Obama and Cameron now demand that that lawfully-elected government dialogue with the jihadists.

FACT: The Muslim Brotherhood/LIFG-dominated Fajr Libya jihadist militia which now runs Tripoli maintains intimate relationships with the jihadist militias that run the human traffic at Libya’s southern borders with Sudan, Chad and Niger. Since August 2014, those latter militias have had a green light from the Tripoli gang to move tens of thousands of human beings through the desert, to the northern coast of Libya. The southern smugglers get $800 for each migrant, and the northern smugglers charge another $1,500 apiece, according to EIR’s sources.

FACT: Aside from the illegal regime change against Qaddafi in 2011, the chief causes of both the enormous misery in the North African/Sahel regions and in the Middle East, and of the rising unemployment and death rates in the Europe to which so many Africans or people from the Middle East are trying to flee, are two: 1) the Anglo-American policies of free trade and brutal austerity enforced by the City of London and Wall Street front groups known as the IMF, the European Commission, and the World Bank, and 2) the Anglo-American policies of accomplished or intended “regime change” as in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, whose war-torn, devastated nations provide a large proportion of the emigrants now trying to sail from Libya, according to the UN High Commission for Refugees. But both policies, that of free trade and of outright destroying sovereign nation states through regime change, are part of a conscious policy of genocide as proclaimed by the British Crown, exemplified by Prince Philip’s repeated demands that the world population must plunge from its present 7.3 billion to 1-2 billion.

There is a completely different alternative to the mass death and misery being caused by the free trade/regime change system of the Anglo-American imperialists, and that is the emerging BRICS alliance for a new, just world economic order. Chinese President Xi Jinping has invited all nations to join this new global financial and economic architecture—including the UK, the United States and Australia—as a “win-win” for the entire world.

Click here for a free copy of the CEC’s pamphlet on the BRICS, Do You Want to Defeat Terrorism? Establish a New, Just World Economic Order!

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