Pretoria, May 01: A South African expert on international affairs has said ongoing NATO airstrikes on Libya represent a ‘form of new colonialism’, and added there is a risk that the Libya crisis could evolve into a prolonged conflict.
“NATO’s operations in Libya could not continue forever. The world’s nations knew this well and they must be careful in not pushing it too far,” Xinhua quoted Anna Alwes, a research fellow at the South African Institute of International Affairs, as saying.
The Western powers justified their intervention with allegations that Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi killed many civilians, Alwes said, adding: But “are we sure there were really so many thousands of deaths as the Western media has reported?”
Libyan war is continuing even one month after the NATO nations launched military operations in Libya.
“I see no immediate solution to the conflict between NATO forces and the Libyan rebels on one side, and Muammar Gaddafi on the other. The ongoing civil war is fated to become an internal cancer that will destroy territorial unity and lead to a partition,” she added.
She stressed on the possibility that both Gaddafi and rebels of the Transitional National Council (TNC) would not give up that easily, and under these circumstances, while “the best solution (for the West) would be that Gaddafi is killed during a raid,” it sounds “quite unrealistic” for two reasons.
First, it’s hard to locate where Gaddafi actually is, she said, and secondly, the rising opposition from the international community against NATO’s intervention makes the intensification of the military operations even more difficult.
—-Agencies