Tyrants: From figures of fear to figures of fun

A younger Muammar Gaddafi

By Mary Beard

From Roman emperors to Colonel Gaddafi, it's easy to turn tyrants from figures of fear into figures of fun. But while their behaviour was often brutal and bloody, that's not all they were, writes Mary Beard.

On 11 March, 222 AD, a posse of rebel soldiers tracked down the Roman Emperor Elagabalus to his hiding place - he had come to power in a coup just four years earlier, supposedly dividing his time between fundamentalist religious reforms, corruption and self-indulgence - but not before they had sodomised and skewered some of his few remaining loyal troops.

Now the tyrant was holed up in a latrine, desperately hoping to keep clear of the liberators, out for his blood. No such luck. The rebels rooted him out, killed him, triumphantly dragged his body through the streets and then threw his mutilated remains into a drain.

The Roman accounts of Elagabalus's end, if not outright unreliable, are certainly embellished at the edges. They may be as misleading as those confused mobile phone images that purported to record the final, bloody moments of Colonel Gaddafi a couple of weeks ago. But what is clear is that one of the basic story lines of "the death of a tyrant" - from hopeless hiding places to sewers and sodomy - was already well established 2,000 years ago.

It's more, though, than just these stories of the tyrant's death that we share with the Romans. We've inherited from them the standard cliches about the life of a tyrant too. In fact, we still operate with a more-or-less Roman view about what's despotic about a despot.

Then as now, of course, killing was central to the image, on a mass scale and sometimes in ingeniously ghastly ways. The Emperor Nero not only massacred his opponents, but he tried to get rid of his own mother using a specially constructed collapsible boat. In fact the tough old bird was a strong swimmer and had to be disposed of using more orthodox methods.

But it doesn't stop with violence. Tyrants are responsible for all kinds of lurid disruptions to the normal rules of social life. Disruptions that have been the trademark of tyranny for at least two millennia.

Take the rules of gender, for a start. Gaddafi's battalion of high-heeled, heavily made-up female bodyguards seem uncannily close to Elagabalus's new Roman governing senate, which was to be made up entirely of women.

But you can add to that the tyrant's penchant for eccentric accommodation - from Gaddafi's idiosyncratic "tent" to Nero's notorious "Golden House" in Rome - and his dubious hobbies. The emperor Domitian was said to have spent his leisure hours stabbing flies with his pen, Gaddafi obsessively collecting pictures of Condoleezza Rice and sticking them into his scrapbook.

'Hearsay and fantasy'

More than anything though, the tyrant - ancient or modern - adopts weird forms of dress. Elagabalus was criticised for being the first Roman to wear outfits made entirely of silk. Gaddafi was derided for his silly, pantomime military uniforms, with their row upon row of spurious medals. To be honest "silliness" here is largely in the eye of the beholder. Quite why Prince Charles's much decorated, gaudy military outfits are not thought silly even though he has never, to my knowledge, seen a single day's service in an actual war, I really can't imagine.

These stereotypes of tyrants are a confused mixture of truth, semi-truth, hearsay and utter fantasy. I very much doubt Gaddafi had the time to go searching for pictures of Condy in the international press, or that Elagabalus's female senate was more than the figment of some ancient tabloid imagination.

So why have they proved so lasting? For various reasons I think. Partly, they are a neat way of turning the dictator from a figure of fear to a figure of fun. Partly, the silly costumes and the mad houses are a whole lot easier for us to talk about than the torture and the murder that goes with tyranny.

But partly, it's laziness. It requires almost no intellectual effort whatsoever to bandy around an off-the-peg, identikit image of the monster - wicked from his clothes to his very core.

It's harder to think about the nuances of tyranny. And it's particularly hard to face the uncomfortable fact that very few of these loathed tyrants are as wholly bad as it suits us to assume.

Nero may have been a murderous persecutor, but even his fiercest critics conceded that he mounted admirable and unprecedented relief measures for the people after the Great Fire of Rome in 64 AD. And, as we know, even the most vicious murderer may love his family deeply, be kind and generous to them, and be loved in return. "Badness" comes in inconveniently complicated ways.

Oil profits

I'm not trying to rehabilitate Nero, or stand up for Gaddafi. If I lived in Libya I hope I would be on the rebel side. And I feel confident that overall the world is a better place without the colonel. Though whether it will be a better place with whatever the National Transitional Council turns into we'll just have to wait and see.

My point is not that we should see Gaddafi as a good man - no-one would try to convince the relatives of Yvonne Fletcher or of the victims of Lockerbie of that. My point is that we sell ourselves short if we don't work a bit harder to move beyond the stereotypes and get a more complicated view of the tyrant. We need to understand why some people supported him, as they passionately did - and not always bad people for bad reasons.

Have you ever wondered why Nelson Mandela was such a friend of the Libyan leader? Or why Mandela's grandson is actually called Gaddafi. It goes back to the 1970s and 80s when Gaddafi gave cash and weapons to the ANC in their fight against apartheid.

Sure, he probably did the same for any band of thugs who fetched up in Tripoli, with a begging bowl for some "anti-colonial cause". But, in this case, at a time when many European countries were still treating anti-apartheid freedom fighters as terrorists, and when the British government was dragging its heels even on economic sanctions against white South Africa, Gaddafi came up with the goods. The Libyan record is bound to look different when you see it from an African rather than a European point of view.

Adulation is 'distrusted'

It also looks a bit different if you dip into some of the statistics about recent conditions in Libya before the war, gathered by the UN and the US state department - hardly natural friends of Gaddafi. No, they don't include any good news about Libyan human rights. Gaddafi's regime was authoritarian at best, violently repressive at worst.

But how often are we told that life expectancy in Libya far exceeds its neighbours, that Libya has a substantially lower child mortality rate than Saudi Arabia, Egypt or Tunisia, the highest literacy rate in North Africa - on US estimates, not the Libyan propaganda machine - as well as free hospitals and childcare?

The profits of oil have not simply been flowing into the pockets of the few, or into the weapons that still stuff the warehouses. Among all the things that have been going terribly wrong under the Gaddafi regime, some things have been going right.

The Romans were actually a bit more prepared than we are to face up to the complexities of tyranny. Among all the cliches they tossed around about the Emperor Nero, they did stop to wonder how to explain the seemingly good things he did. Did he start out well and only later go to the bad? Or was he the victim of a change of advisers?

But it was Publius Cornelius Tacitus, the sharpest Roman historian of them all, who hit the nail on the head. In the introduction to his book that would include an account of the reign of Domitian (the notorious fly-stabber), Tacitus reflected on how best to analyse tyranny. It's problematic, he wrote, because it's very hard to find out the truth.

The temptation is to go one of two ways - total adulation for the tyrant's achievements or blanket vilification of his crimes. Readers, he went on, distrust adulation. It looks like flattery. They tend to trust vilification, as criticism appears more objective. But that doesn't mean, he warns, that it is necessarily right.

Maybe we should remember Tacitus's words the next time some time-expired despot crawls out of a sewer to his death.

Mary Beard is Professor of Classics at Cambridge University in the UK. She is also an author.

Even in the face of potential Israeli attack, Iran remains defiant....

By Marwa Awad - Reuters

The United States fears Iran's growing military power because it is now able to compete with Israel and the West, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said in comments carried by an Egyptian newspaper on Monday.

Responding to a toughening stance from the United States and Israel against Tehran, Ahmadinejad accused Washington of inventing conspiracies to discredit Iran and sowing discord with its near neighbor Saudi Arabia.

"Yes, we have military capabilities that are different from any other country in the region," Egyptian daily al-Akhbar cited Ahmadinejad as saying. "Iran is increasing in capability and advancement and therefore we are able to compete with Israel and the West and especially the United States."

"The U.S. fears Iran's capability," he told the paper. "Iran will not permit (anyone from making) a move against it."

Iran's Islamic rulers, who say Israel has no right to exist, deny accusations that they are seeking nuclear weapons and have warned they will respond to any attacks by striking at Israel and U.S. interests in the Gulf.

A senior U.S. military official said on Friday Iran had become the biggest threat to the United States and Israel's president said the military option to stop the Islamic republic from obtaining nuclear weapons was nearer.

Ahmadinejad repeated that Iran does not own a nuclear bomb, but said Israel's end was inevitable.

The U.N. nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, is expected this week to issue its most detailed report yet on research in Iran seen as geared to developing atomic bombs.

"It is Israel that has about 300 nuclear warheads. Iran is only keen to have nuclear capability for peaceful means," he said, accusing Washington of lumping Iran with Syria, the Islamist Hamas movement that rules Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The U.S. portrays those four as "the Axis of Evil to save the Zionist entity (Israel). But the Zionists are bound to go out of existence," he said.

Responding to a U.S. claim that Iran was involved in a plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to Washington, Ahmadinejad said: "Iran is farthest from thinking of carrying out such crimes but the U.S. is always inventing conspiracies against Iran."

"The U.S. fears any friendship between us and Saudi Arabia and therefore incites disagreements," he said. "To stop the U.S. in its tracks we must deepen the elements of friendship... We are ready for this and the relation between Saudi and Iran already exists and has not been cut off."

More bloodshed in northern Nigeria as Jonathan stands pat

President Jonathan in pensive mood

By the Editor-in-Chief

It has become an all too common occurrence, more-so since Nigeria's current leader, Goodluck Jonathan assumed power in May of 2010.

Just to establish the facts as they are, the last time there was another "upheaval" along ethnic or religious lines, was when another Southerner, Olusegun Obasanjo, also a former military ruler, was in office. It was then the Northern states decided to adopt the Islamic code of Sharia, again in defiance of the central government.

While many are quick to refer to the recent wave of attacks as strictly a religious affair, under the auspices of the Boko Haram Islamic sect, this writer begs to differ, as any right thinking observer with deep knowledge of the inner-workings of Nigeria's political power-play, will understand exactly where I am coming from.

To get a clear understanding of the reasons behind Nigeria's political malaise, one has to go back to the origins of the "marriage of convenience" called Nigeria. The truth is that while the latter "has not worked" to date, it has not been for a lack of the requisite ingredients for success, but more as a result of the machinations of a powerful few within the Northern political establishment and their backers in the South.

Since Nigeria's independence from the United Kingdom on October 1, 1960, the country has been plunged into untenable political tension, mostly as a result of the legacy of feudalism and political entitlement practiced and felt by the Northerner ruling class, respectively.

The legacy of the British Empire as it relates to the contraption and division of several African States (including Nigeria) that were under their rule at the time, is unquestionably what has led to majority of the wars you see across both North Africa and much of Africa to the South (this writer detests the term sub-Sahara and as such will not use it).

Nigeria is a prime example of the preceding point as the 1961 plebiscite, which showed the rather sharp differences between the Hausa dominated North, the Igbo dominated East and the Yoruba dominated West, led to the fracturing of the country as the power imbalance continued to shift more in favor of the core North.

This disequilibrium and perceived (but real) corruption of the electoral and political process led to several back-to-back military coups in 1966. The first was led by a collection of largely Igbo military officers who went on to assassinate then Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa (a Northerner), the Northern Premier Ahmadu Bello and Premier Ladoke Akintola of the Western Region.

The instability from this coup then led to a counter-coup orchestrated largely by Northern military officers and it led essentially to a blood-bath of immense proportions, with military and civilian figures, mostly of Igbo extraction, bearing the brunt of it.

With a young "Northern" officer, Yakubu Gowon (his background itself lending credence to the complicated nature of Nigeria's body polity) now at the helm of the central government, the ethnic and religious undertones of the successive coups, would only serve to fan the embers of division in the country.

Nigeria was soon plunged into a civil war as increasing violence against the Igbo across much of the North, only increased their desire for autonomy, as the military and other security apparatus in the country (largely dominated by the North at the time) offered the Igbo little or no protection.

By May 1967, the Igbo dominated Eastern Region had declared itself an independent state called the Republic of Biafra under the leadership of Lt Colonel Emeka Ojukwu in line with what he said were the "wishes of his people". The Nigerian Civil War began as the Nigerian (the North with the acquiescence of the West) side attacked Biafra (South-eastern) on July 6, 1967 at Garkem signaling the beginning of the 30 month war that ended in January 1970. Over a million people died as a result of the three year war for the soul and destiny of what is today still Nigeria.

Then leader, Yakubu Gowon, in the spirit of brotherhood declared "no victor, no vanquished" as the Biafra rebels surrendered and Nigeria "remained in tact".

Events since the end of that Civil War would seem to however buttress the notion of many watchers of the Nigerian political climate, who claim the country remains a "power keg" waiting to explode.

Since 1970, Nigeria, after the first two military coups, has had six military coups, with two being unsuccessful - the one in 1976 which killed the Head-of-State but did not remove the government and the unsuccessful Gideon Orkar-led coup of 1990 against then military dictator, Ibrahim Babangida.

This is hardly a recipe for success and the fact that Nigeria seemed to have turn the corner in 1999 with the advent of the still fragile Second Republic, does not change the fact that the ethnic and religious undercurrent, a tool used by the Northern elite in particular to advance their selfish interests, remains a headache and one for which the cure is no where in sight.

The biggest obstacle to Nigeria's progress remains the greed and avarice commonplace with the ruling class, in the North and the South as well. The Northern ruling class however have a voracious appetite for power and have shown over the years that they are willing to do anything to not only get it, but also hold on to it.

Their cohorts in the Southwest and the Southeast are always there to strengthen them from behind, as long as the stakes are not so high that the over-arching interests of either of them (North and Southern ruling class) is threatened.

Consequently, the general population, who really could care less about the ethnic or religious "differences" being used by a few sectional interests to divide them, remain the proverbial pawns in this dangerous game.

The Northern power structure is intent on destroying the political and social fabric of the nation, unless their wishes are granted. Their born-to-rule disposition which was hatched in the incubators of power in the North and perpetuated in the corridors of power across much of the nation, has become a self-fulfilling prophesy, but with unintended consequences.

Boko Haram was not supposed to go on a killing spree and murder innocent Northern and other civilians, as well as their political leaders (Boko Haram's benefactors). The Northern power brokers, with the usual suspects leading the charge, can only watch as the fire they had hoped would "burn gently" has slowly engulfed their domain, while threatening the corporate existence of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

It has not helped matters either that Nigeria has a "smiling president" that thinks he needs not do anything, but hope for "Divine Intervention". One can't however blame a man who has never really worked for anything he has become, but had it all given to him, literally.

President Jonathan needs to however realize that the blood of the innocent citizens who have been murdered in cold blood by these band of marauders and terrorists, must be avenged. While I know the concept of revenge, more-so when it is justified, has become untenable to the sycophants in the halls of the UN and the liberal Human Rights Watch (both organizations that have outlived their usefulness), Nigeria's government must NOT negotiate with Boko Haram, but ensure that the group and its benefactors, who are well known to those in power, are brought to task for their acts of treason and sedition against the Nigerian State.

The Nigerian people and much of the civilized world needs to see this president finally live up to his responsibilities and duties as the leader of one of the most important democracies in the world.

Intellectual Capital: Unique solutions from development to deployment

In my first installment of a new weekly feature to be titled "Intellectual Capital" (on Wednesdays), I will be delving into the unconventional but effective business model of a Northwest company that is stirring up the pot in the IT Consulting and Software Development space, iFusionIT.

iFusionIT, LLC is a software development company that specializes in SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), Gaming, BI (Business Intelligence) reporting and IT Consulting. The Bellevue based company also has earned critical acclaim for its work in the Utilities and Finance verticals.

Established in 2006, the company has managed to stay on a clear path, even in the most trying of times, the last three years in particular.

The IT Consulting space is about as compact as the Telco space was a few years back. However, in keeping with the vision of its founders (IT gurus in their own right with a combined experience of close to two-thirds of a century), the company has stuck to its business model, by leveraging its solid base of partners, consultants and industry network, while executing with precision on its clients' mission critical needs.

In addition to an office in Bellevue (its corporate headquarters), iFusionIT also has an office in India and the company has stayed lean and efficient, while maximizing its expertise and core competencies to its advantage, as well as that of its clients.

Most private organizations are reticent to talk about their growth, more-so in this most dire of economic times, in recent memory.

The leadership at iFusionIT however extolls its own virtues in this regard, pointing to its almost 200% growth (organically) over the last three years, again, in the face of some of the most emaciating economic circumstances.

How did they do it, you might ask? Well, for starters, they have never wavered from their number one guiding principle, that of understanding their customer's needs and thus tuning their processes to meet those needs in a timely and efficient manner.

In the age of Cloud Computing, Lean Project Management and Data Warehousing, it can be rather easy for an organization to lose sight of what made them successful in the first place.

At iFusionIT, the focus seems to have always been on doing what was needed, when it was needed and precisely just the way it was needed.

That may sound rather simplicistic, but far too often, organizations make things more complicated than they ought to be, but at iFusionIT, the key to the company's ability to stay ahead of the game, has always been to keep things simple.

While keeping things simple, iFusionIT has also understood the importance of pioneering in technological innovation. The company is able to support development projects, by virtue of its State-of-The-Art network infrastructure, it claims is second to none.

Furthermore and perhaps critical to its ability to be strategic, is that its project management team specializes in the most conventional project methodologies, such as SDLC, AGILE, SCRUM and WATERFALL, from design to implementation.

It is quite a tall order for a relatively small company to be so ambitious, but iFusionIT has shown that it has absolutely no qualms in mixing it up with the big boys.

The future will tell, but for now, it looks pretty bright.

About iFusionIT
Founded in 2006, iFusionIT envisioned building a comprehensive solution to lead IT Consulting services, Mobile Application Development, Gaming services and Service Oriented Architecture. The founding members have over 50 years of IT experience themselves; leading, developing and designing IT projects.

The company through its innovative ideas has grown in various verticals such as IT, Utilities, Gaming, Finance and Business Intelligence Technologies.

We are a trusted partner to the world's leading organizations and institutions. We believe in an eco-system where everyone working for us benefits and we take pride in doing what is right for the customer.

As Nintendo continues to bleed, forecast revised downwards

TOKYO - Japanese game maker Nintendo Co. said today its net loss grew to 70.3 billion yen ($925 million) for the six months through September, battered by the strong yen and weaksoftware sales.

The maker of the Wii game console and DS handheld slashed its forecast for the full year through next March to a 20 billion yen ($263 million) net loss, it said in a statement. In July, it had predicted an annual net profit of 20 billion yen.

Nintendo, which scored success by courting casual gamers, is now battling increased competition from Apple Inc.'s iPhone and other devices that offer simple games.

Competition in portable gaming is also heating up with the anticipated arrival of rival Sony Corp.'s latest portable offering, PlayStation Vita. Vita goes on sale in Japan on Dec. 17, and early next year in the U.S. and Europe.

The strong yen has also dealt a heavy blow to the company, which receives nearly 80 percent of its sales overseas. Nintendo said exchange rate losses totaled 52.4 billion yen ($689 million).

Overall sales during the half-year tumbled 41 percent to 215.7 billion yen. And the half-year loss was twice as big a loss as the company had projected in July. During the same period last year, it had a net loss of 2 billion yen.

Nintendo's 3DS handheld, which offers 3D gaming without special glasses, has been a relative disappointment since it went on sale in February in Japan and in March overseas.

The company is fighting to win back customers ahead of the critical year-end shopping season, cutting the price of the 3DS, and is coming out with more games, including 3D versions of its trademark Super Mario games.

The price reduction has lifted 3DS sales, the company said Thursday. For the six months, it sold 3.07 million units of the 3DS, and 8.13 million units of software.

One title, "The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D," sold more than a million units, but the company acknowledged that the 3DS "has yet to have many hit titles."

Sales of its regular DS handheld for the half-year fell to 2.58 million units from 6.69 million the same period a year ago. Sales of Nintendo DS software declined to 28.99 million units during the six-month period from 54.84 million last year.

As for its Wii game console, sales for the period fell to 3.35 million units from 4.97 million units last year, while software sales declined to 36.45 million units from 65.21 million a year earlier.

Source: AP News

It's an e-mail scam, not a "Nigerian scam"....

Editor's Corner

Imagine my surprise when I turned to the consumer page of the Attorney General of the State of Washington to find that a whole people, in this case citizens of Nigeria, had been painted with a wide brush (see former website content below in italics). Regarding the latter, I am talking about the much talked about e-mail scams or advance fee fraud, many believe originated from that West African nation.

"E-mail Scams - Advance fee and counterfeit check/Nigerian scams: If you suffered a financial loss you can file a complaint with the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center at www.ic3.gov"

To better understand this issue, it will be prudent to give a brief overview of the most populous country on the African continent, a nation that has disbursed so much good to much of humanity, with some bad mixed in (show me a perfect country or people).

Nigeria gained its independence from Britain on October 1st, 1960. For the last 51 years, the country has experienced a civil war (that lasted for three years 1967-1970 and killed 1 million of its citizens) while also enjoying a long spell of economic prosperity and boom from the 70s to the late-80s (much from oil and other natural resources she has been blessed with).

Lately, beginning in the 1990s, the countrys infrastructure, image and over-all national reputation has taking a beating, mainly as a result of defective leadership laced with unbecoming greed and avarice.

The general climate of corruption (not quite different from what you would find in most countries but quite overt in Nigeria) has led to an expected societal breakdown, where law, order and common decency became an exception and not the norm.

For all of its struggles with corruption and the systematic destruction of its storied instututions and culture, much of this by its own military, with the acquiescence of the West (the latter mostly concerned with taking its resources by any means), the country has re-set itself back on course, with democratic elections in 1999 and has never looked back since.

The descent into "white collar crime" with the e-mail scams and other forms of criminal activity (by a very marginal minority) does NOT define the nature and character of Nigerians (close to 200 million people), with many Nigerians contributing as physicians, scientists, technology experts and business executives in much of the world, particularly Africa, Europe and the United States (with a well established immigrant population in the Puget Sound as well).

While the e-mail/advance fee scam has generally been portrayed as a "Nigerian Scam", recent investigations by the Nigerian State Security Service (SSS) (working in conjunction with the FBI and Interpol) have shown that most of these crimes (e-mail/advance fee scams) have actually been commited by citizens of other West African countries, namely Ghana, the Sierra Leone and Liberia (due to the wars and extreme poverty in the latter two).

The interesting spin to the preceding information is that America's next door neighbor, Canada, has become a notorious breeding ground as well for a large proportion of these e-mail and other transactional scams. Witness the Canadian "lottery winner" e-mails as well as the offer to send you a "cashiers check" when you try to sell your car on Craigslist.

The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), a body recently set up by Nigeria's democratically elected government, has also been very aggressive in pursuing the perpetrators of ALL financial crimes, within the Nigerian state.

While it is true that the Nigerian government "needs to do more to ensure that this menace is curtailed (at least within its borders), one can say that the US government also needs to do more, by advising its citizens not to reply to e-mail solicitations to receive money from "relatives", they never had in Nigeria or anywhere else in the first place.

The advance fee fraud and e-mail scam developed a life of its own by the default of enablement. The greed and avarice in the United States (particularly on Wall Street) is there for all to see, but I am yet to see any Attorney General websites or newspapers refer to those as "American scam" or even worse still, label the scam on Wall Street with an ethnic delineation.

I am grateful to the deputy Chief-of-Staff of the Washington AG for heeding my call and that of other well-meaning and hardworking Nigerians to remove the "Nigerian" label on this disgraceful activity.

One would hope that the likes of Sean Robinson (Staff Writer at the Tacoma News Tribune) might also learn something and understand that much like the criminals on Wall Street and those on the corners of the worst neighborhoods of Tacoma and indeed America who murder (serial killers et al), rape, pillage, molest and commit countless heinous crimes, are not branded with an American or other ethnic-American brush, it would be fool-hardy to do the same to others.

NATO's hypocrisy and a dictator's death by the drain

Editor's Corner


It is obvious to many now (although most of us had said it) that NATO's sole motive for being at the helm of the so-called "humanitarian mission to protect civilians" in the Libyan conflict, was to eliminate Muammar Gaddafi, the late Libyan dictator. Dan Glazebrook recently wrote that the NATO mission had been turned on its head as French and British leaders with the acquiescence of Washington, sought to use the opportunity to pursue their own personal agenda.

There is no questioning the fact that Gaddafi needed to go, but that should have been up to the Libyan people and not a band of thugs and marauders, who have in fact raped and pillaged, while also summarily executing thousands of innocent African immigrants in Libya.

What is befuddling is that neither NATO or Washington know exactly who these Libyan "liberators" are, or do they....

Several credible reports have emerged since the war began that there is in fact a strong Al-Qaeda  presence in the National Transitional Council.

That France, Britain and the United States, the first two in particular could be seen as hypocrites in all of this, is not even debatable. After all, this was the same Gaddafi that the likes of Nicolas Sarkozy (the new Napoleon), Gordon Brown, Barack Obama and Silvio Berlusconi, welcomed as a friend at the G8 Summit in Italy, just two years ago.

The irony of all ironies is that most of the same weapons allegedly used by Gaddafi to "murder his own people" were supplied to him by, you guessed it, his "old friends" in Britain and the United States.

Here are some cold facts to ponder:

• Many of the weapons used by Libyan dictator’s regime were in fact purchased from Britain. According to the AP: “Britain sold Libya about $55 million worth of military and paramilitary equipment in the year ending Sept. 30, 2010, according to Foreign Office statistics. Among the items: sniper rifles, bulletproof vehicles, crowd control ammunition, and tear gas”
• The notorious Khamis brigade troops (Libya’s elite forces under the direct command of one of Gaddafi son’s) contracted an $170 million command and control system from General Dynamics UK – one of the deals cut with the personal backing of the then British PM Tony Blair.
• Not only did the British arm the forces of the Gaddafi regime, they also trained them. The Khamis brigade troops were also trained by the SAS as well as being armed by British companies.
• The British government was complicit in the rendition and torture of several Libyans and one of the victims Sami al Saadi is currently suing the British government, for its active organization and participation, as revealed in documents unearthed, after Gaddafi's fall.
• Documents also show that the CIA kidnapped the Libyan rebel commander Abdel Hakim Belhaj in 2004, along with his pregnant wife and he was delivered to Gaddafi's regime for rendition. 
• According to a BBC report, from the files unearthed at Gaddafi's compound after his overthrow, CIA agents were indeed present at some of those interrogations at the notorious Abu Selim prison. 
• Ironically, it was Saif al Islam, Gaddafi's son who is still at large, who freed Belhaj in 2010, under the "de-radicalization" drive, championed by the former. 

While the CIA had obviously begun their relationship with the regime earlier, by 2008, former president George W. Bush sent his top diplomat Condoleezza Rice to Libya for talks with the regime, and in the same year, Texas-based Exxon Mobil signed an exploration agreement with the Libyan National Oil Corp. to explore for hydrocarbons off the Libyan coast.

According to the same AP Report, the White House approved the sale of military items to Libya in recent years, giving private arms firms licenses to sell everything from explosives and incendiary agents to aircraft parts and targeting equipment. 

Furthermore, the Bush administration approved the sale of $3 million of materials to Libya in 2006 and $5.3 million in 2007. 

In 2008, Libya was allowed to import $46 million in armaments from the US. The approved goods included nearly 400 shipments of explosive and incendiary materials, 25,000 aircraft parts, 56,000 military electronics components, and nearly 1,000 items of optical targeting and other guidance equipment.

One can conclude that the West, with Britain, France and the United States leading, armed and supported Gaddafi and his legion of doom, in the torture and sometimes murder of Libyan opposition figures and other citizens, opposed to his tyrannical rule.

They supported Gaddafi politically by opening up diplomatic channels and meetings, while also working hard to open the regime up to Western commercial interests.The United Nations, for all its chattercrawl, was itself complicit in all this, albeit, mostly by default.

Gaddafi's fate should be an eye-opener for all to see that not all that glitters is gold. African and non-Western leaders, whose countries possess untold resources, germane to the sustenance of Western economic interests, need be aware, that the latter will go to any length, to get what they need and want.

That the United Nations and its "first cousin" the ICC have become a tool for the various machinations of Western imperialists, is even more reason for leaders of African and other developing nations, to reconsider their membership of those failed institutions.

Video of Gaddafi's capture and subsequent execution below (Warning! - Graphic Material):

Apple full-year profits up 85%

The world's biggest technology company Apple has reported full year results, showing net profit for the year to 25 September at $26b, up 85% from the previous year.

Even that was not enough to satisfy Wall Street, with the shares falling nearly 5% in after-hours trading.

There was some disappointment with the fourth quarter of the year, when no major new products were released.

It is the first set of results since the death of co-founder Steve Jobs.

In the fourth quarter of the year, Apple sold 17.1 million iPhones, which was a 21% increase on the same period last year, and 11.1 million iPads, which was a 166% increase.

But analysts had been expecting iPhone sales of 20 million in the quarter.

Apple said sales were hurt in September by customers waiting for the new version, the iPhone 4S, which was released on 14 October.

It sold four million of the new models in the first three days after launch.

"The numbers came in weak. They need to set records every time they report to keep up the momentum," said Colin Gillis, analyst at BGC Partners.

Apple sold 4.9 million Mac computers in the quarter - up 27% over the same period last year.

Many analysts believe that the company's future remains "uncertain" as core consumer fear of a lack of continuity of innovation, following the death of Jobs, may ultimately lead to the loss of some brand loyalty.

Like most colonial atrocities, German crimes against humanity haunt Namibians

Germany refuses to pay reparations for its crimes in Namibia

In our series of viewpoints from African journalists, film-maker and columnist Farai Sevenzo asks why there are no memorials to those killed in Namibia during German colonial rule.

According to The Namibian newspaper, there was a 2.8% decrease in the number of tourists visiting Namibia last year while some 984,099 visitors had gone through Windhoek airport in the year of Africa's football World Cup in neighbouring South Africa.

When I read these figures, I assumed the slight decrease could only be due to the depressing global economic climate - for anyone who has seen the beauty of this stunning African nation would gladly return there were it not for the cruel fate of the gods of credit, who have ordered the tourists to stay at home instead of travelling to faraway lands.

After all, an elephant in the bush may look better in high definition television.

But as we were reminded in the last week, 107 years before this year's high definition nature programmes, a different kind of visitor had been in South West Africa - as Namibia was known before its independence in 1990 - in search of conquest, not elephants.

Between 1904 and 1908, German occupiers systematically massacred ancestors of the Herero and Nama people for daring to rebel.

Under the leadership of Lieutenant General Lother von Trotha, the rebelling groups were killed or driven into the desert, where thousands died of thirst - all normal practice at the time for conquering armies.

But it was what followed which has cast a century-long shadow over German-Namibian relations.

'Gruesome experiments'

Not content with mere conquest, the Germans placed the survivors in concentration camps, built their colony with slave labour and then shipped off thousands of heads belonging to the dead to Berlin - for the totally barbaric aim of proving the inferiority of the defeated Africans in dubious medical experiments.

Fast forward to free Namibia, which had been demanding the return of these skulls, lost to German storage units.

It is a fact of life that we all value our dead, that the living wish to honour the departed and the ruthless disregard for the humanity of the owners of these heads would weigh heavily on any African.

Much had been written about the parallels of the Namibian genocide with its gruesome experiments surrounding the African dead and the subsequent Nazi holocaust of World War II.

Modern German politicians were quick to offer their regret for the sins of their forefathers and claimed to accept "moral responsibility" for the genocidal crimes of the past.

But no reparations were to be paid to the Herero and Nama descendants of this bloody history.

Instead, the German government says it already pays through development aid and recently announced about $173m (£110m) in aid for 2011-2012.

'Prayer and anguish'

Despite the fact that the Namibian victims of this crime see it as genocide, Germany has never acknowledged it as such and the scars of the past remain fully visible in the present day.

Namibia is not a poor country - fish and beef exports, diamonds and uranium - should be supporting 2.1 million people.

Yet the legacy of German colonialism has left hundreds of thousands without land and German descendants still farm on land that was forcefully taken from the murdered.

It is not difficult to imagine how such a situation may end, particularly as a tiny fraction of the population continues to run the economy and the landless remain without land.

As 20 skulls from the thousands that were taken arrived in Windhoek last Thursday, many voices were raised in prayer and anguish and, Africans being as close to their dead as they imagine their dead are to them, a deep sense of gravitas seemed to overlay proceedings.

But no firm answers were given on the issue of reparations - nor when the Herero and Nama can expect the rest of their ancestors' heads to be returned.

And in present day Namibia, frequented as it is by hundreds of thousands of tourists - German and other kinds - there is no standing memorial to the Namibian dead, no plaque at Luderitz, Swakopmund or Shark Island to mark the sites of German concentration camps or the mass graves of those who died.

Why should such a story matter? For those of us with such short histories, the past is a permanent shadow, forever by our side or right behind us.

Just 27 years before South Africa's Nobel laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu - 80 last week - was born, a German army commander was issuing orders, in writing, to exterminate Namibians, drive them into the desert and poison the wells.

There are volumes of records in the Windhoek Archives detailing the massacres and recording every death of enslaved laborers.

Of course, there are those who say we must move on, we must close the chapters on tragic histories.

It is our lot on this continent to forever be urged to forget the past when such a past is so near and is as tangible as a four year old's skull in a medical laboratory far from African lands.

No amount of development aid could erase that.

Kercher family remember 'forgotten' daughter

Kercher was murdered in cold blood

By Colleen Barry and Alessandra Rizzo

PERUGIA, Italy — Meredith Kercher would have been 25. The British student would have finished her degree at Leeds University and perhaps been preparing for another Halloween, a day she loved.

Instead, her family awaits an appeals verdict expected Monday against former roommate Amanda Knox, of Seattle, who was convicted along with her Italian ex-boyfriend of murdering Kercher in 2007.

Kercher's killing has spawned one of Italy's most sensational and closely watched trials. Yet to her family's frustration, Kercher has been eclipsed in the public's eye by the 24-year-old Knox, as supporters of the photogenic American mount a high-profile campaign to free her.

By contrast, Kercher's family has chosen to remain largely silent during the years of trial and appeal, quietly honoring her memory on the Nov. 1 anniversary of her death and her birthday on Dec. 28. But they are growing increasingly agitated as the appeal verdict approaches.

In one of the few TV interviews they have granted, Kercher's sister Stephanie and mother Arline said attention should focus on justice for the victim, not Knox or her ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, who is also appealing his conviction alongside Knox.

"In this whole case — going on four years — Meredith has been forgotten," Stephanie Kercher said in a recorded interview on RAI public television this month.

"The attention has completely moved from Meredith to Amanda and Raffaele," she said. "She was lovely, kind and we lost her."

On her last Halloween, one day before her death, Meredith dressed as a vampire. Photographs, some of the last of her life, show her smiling brightly with red lipstick, a high-collared cape wrapped around her neck.

The young student fought hard for approval from her university to study in the charming medieval town of Perugia, arriving in September 2007. She was excited to have found a room with a view of the Umbrian landscape, court records show. She shared the apartment with two young Italian women and Knox, who moved in around the same time.

Kercher made friends fast, testimony in the first trial shows. Within weeks, she had a small group of British girlfriends with whom she went dancing or watched films, and she had started dating a young Italian living downstairs. Giacomo Silenzi has said they fell in love quickly, and has been left to wonder what the future might have held had she not been killed.

On the last night of her life, she ate pizza and apple crumble with a small group of friends, watched a movie and went home alone around 9 p.m., according to court testimony.

Meredith was 21 when she was found the afternoon of Nov. 2 sprawled naked on the floor of her locked bedroom, throat slashed, body covered in a blanket.

Prosecutors claim that she was murdered when a drug-fueled sexual encounter with the two defendants and a third man went awry. Rudy Guede, an Ivorian who lived in Perugia from age 5, is serving a 16-year sentence for his role in the murder.

Knox was sentenced to 26 years, Sollecito to 25. All three proclaim innocence.

Meredith's father John Kercher, a freelance journalist, has said he refused to view her body, so he could remember as she was in life.

"I had last seen her a couple of weeks before, when she flew home to buy winter clothes. We met for a coffee and she showed me some boots she had bought," John Kercher wrote in the Britain's Daily Mirror tabloid. "I want that to be the one memory of my daughter I hold in my mind forever."

She was the baby of the family, with three older siblings — two brothers and a sister.

She loved ballet and gymnastics, and had an orange belt in karate. She wrote poetry and stories. People remembered her as being warm and generous, full of hugs, lending class notes to anyone who asked, and always rushing to help anyone who needed it.

After arriving in Perugia, she kept a cell phone with a British number to stay in close contact with her mother, who was in poor health.

Only one vice is ever mentioned. "She was always late, always running," her mother Arline said on the RAI TV interview. "She was a girl full of life. She loved music, she loved to dance. She was full of joy in her heart."

The degree the quietly studious Kercher would have been awarded in 2009 was granted posthumously. It was accepted by her sister Stephanie to a standing ovation at Leeds.

During rebuttals on Friday, the Kerchers' lawyer, Francesco Maresca, urged the jury to "confirm the truth" in front of the victim's mother, sister and a brother, who would make the journey to Italy for the verdict.

"You will look Meredith's family in the eyes only once," Maresca said. "They could not always be here in court due to the mother's health problems and siblings' economic problems."

In fact, he said, they had trouble finding airline tickets for the verdict, which the lawyer contrasted with reports that the Knox family had a private jet ready to whisk the American student out of the country in the case of a not guilty finding. Knox's family has denied the existence of such a plan.

Earlier, prosecutor Giuliano Mignini said acquitting Knox would mean forever losing a chance at justice.

"We know what an acquittal means — a swift escape abroad," he told the appeals court. "Escape we could no longer remedy."

The prosecution detailed DNA evidence and other circumstantial clues as they had their last chance to talk to the jury.

While they cling to their memories, the Kercher family says it will continue to fight for justice — even as it delays their own process of healing.

The Kerchers have no doubts about whether Knox is guilty — and express rage that she's garnering most of the attention.

"As a journalist myself, I know the reason why. Knox is young, attractive and female. To many, she seems an unlikely killer," John Kercher wrote in The Daily Mail tabloid in December as the appeals trial got under way. "Yet to my family she is, unequivocally, culpable."

Source: AP News