Arrest warrant against Gaddafi may turn out to be a major mistake

International news agencies were on Monday reporting celebrations across the Libyan city of Misrata as news came in that the International Criminal Court had issued arrest warrants against Col Muammar Gaddafi.

The court is satisfied that the mercurial Libyan leader had ordered attacks on civilians in the attempt to crush his country’s four-month people’s uprising.

The Hague court also issued arrest warrants for Gaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam, and Intelligence chief Abdullah al-Sanussi.

Now, I am no fan of the Brother-Leader-Guide of the Libyan revolution. My youthful fascination with the man ended when I grew up and realised he was nothing more than than a raging megalomaniac rather than the dashing revolutionary.

All the same, I am not convinced that the ICC action is right. All it does is to reinforce perceptions that the ICC is concentrating on Africa at the behest of Western powers.

Already, the US, Britain, France and other countries have hijacked the Libyan revolution, and thus bolstered the Colonel’s claims that he was fighting a Western invasion rather than a home-grown insurrection.

ICC intervention at this stage only muddies the waters because it looks like the West is ratcheting up pressure against Gaddafi.

The African Union secretariat under Jean Ping has been at the centre of a campaign driven largely by the Kenya Government seeking to incite African governments against the ICC.

That is part of the strategy aimed at saving Kenya’s own suspects from the clutches of tenacious ICC prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo.

Now you can be sure that the AU and reactionary leaders in the club of tyrants and kleptomaniacs will be up in arms against foreign interference.

South African President Jacob Zuma has been heading an AU mission trying to broker a resolution to the Libyan crisis.

The mission has been centred on crafting an acceptable exit strategy for Gaddafi, plans which might be thrown into disarray by the arrest warrant.

Without an escape route, the Libyan leadership may well resolve to fight to the bitter end, the result being a much bigger loss of human life.

President Zuma, whose country is a member of the United Nations Security Council, supported the UN resolution permitting air strikes against Gaddafi forces.

But he has since been harshly critical that the Nato bombers have gone beyond the mandate to protect civilian lives and instead gone on an offensive aimed at toppling the regime.

Mistakes by Nato bombers that have resulted in significant civilian casualties have not helped.

The Libyan people need to be freed of the Gaddafi dictatorship and they certainly need international help. But the revolution must not lose its legitimacy to misguided interventions.

In this globalised world, there will always be external intervention in any situation, but it must be well-planned and with clear and altruistic goals.

Knee-jerk reactions such as those that provoked the American-led invasion of Iraq only lead to what President Obama came to describe as a ‘dumb war’.

Now he is in danger of having his own dumb war in Libya even before he extricates US troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.

There must be cleverer ways of helping the Libyan revolution rather than ham-fisted approaches that smack purely of hatred for Col Gaddafi.

After all, if the US, Britain, France and other powers in the Western alliance really wanted to spread democracy, human rights and the rule of law across the Arab world, they could have started by easing out their friendly feudal sheiks in allied client states such Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Oman and the other Gulf dictatorships.

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I visited my alma mater at the weekend, and came out very depressed. A school that once stood proud has gone to the dogs.

Dormitories have fallen apart, dining halls are in pathetic state and students slouch around rather unkempt.

A group of Old Boys has done a sterling job raising funds and repairing some facilities, but it could be throwing good money after bad.

The problem is not money; it is lack of a leadership that can restore Lenana School to its former glory.

mgaitho@ke.nationmedia.com