Malaysia - Tales of gods and demons

In the war to overthrow Gaddafi, where does one draw the line between good and evil, or ‘regime change’ and ‘responsibility to protect’?

Yesterday (October 26) was Deepavali, the Hindu festival of lights, celebrated to mark the triumph of good over evil.

Numerous myths and a myriad of gods are associated with the festival. (While Hindus believe in a singular Supreme Being, there are supposedly 333 million gods in the Hindu pantheon, all divine conceptions of the Supreme One.)

For Malaysian Hindus who can trace their ancestry to South India, the most common story is that of the blue-hued Lord Krishna (or Vishnu in his eighth incarnation) killing the hated demon King Narakasura.

According to legend, Narakasura was a grubby giant who ruled Pragjyotishapura, said to be located near the present-day Indian state of Assam.

His was truly a reign of terror. Drunk with too much power, he even treated the gods with disdain.

The demon abducted 16,000 daughters of deities as his insatiable lust for virgins knew no bounds.

But the proverbial last straw was his brazen snatching of earrings worn by Aditi, the mother of the gods.

All hell, or more applicably, all heaven, broke loose. The livid gods appealed to Krishna to take on Narakasura.

Krishna slayed Narakasura, recovered the earrings, freed all the divine damsels and also married all of them – at their request.

Yes, the accounts say that he could multiply into 16,000 forms, live in 16,000 different palaces and carry out different duties simultaneously, besides fathering 10 sons with each wife.

It’s a matter of different religions but one can’t help but wonder if the myth can help strengthen the Obedient Wives Club’s (OWC) idea of “spiritual sexual relations”, as explained by its head Fauziah Ariffin recently.

But let’s not digress from the subject of gods and demons.

When Libyan autocrat Muammar Gaddafi was killed after being captured by rebel forces in Sirte last Thursday, the reaction could be compared to the slaying of Narakasura in Hindu mythology.

The coverage of the mainstream media (the global, not the much bad-mouthed local one) centred on the theme of a tyrant’s overthrow – a modern-day conquest of good over evil.

Gaddafi grabbed power in 1969 in a bloodless coup against a British-backed king but his regime was indeed a violent and brutal one.

The bombing of Pan Am’s Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, which killed 273 passengers, is listed as among his atrocities.

In 1986, he ordered the bombing of a popular nightspot in Berlin, Germany, where two people were killed and 50 others injured.

The then US President Ronald Reagan retaliated with air strikes, including on Gaddafi’s palace.

Gaddafi is also accused of ordering the massacre of more than 1,200 prisoners at the Abu Salim prison in 1996.

But as Michel Chossudovsky, Professor of Economics, University of Ottawa and founder of the Centre for Research on Globalisation (CRG), notes, whatever one’s views regarding Gaddafi, he did much to eliminate poverty and develop the country’s health and educational infrastructure.

Libya’s progress was in sharp contrast to what most Third World countries were able to achieve under Western style “democracy” and “governance” in the context of standard International Monetary Fund-World Bank structural adjustment programmes.

It was viewed as the “Switzerland of the African continent”, a relatively rich country where people had access to many things which others in the region could only dream of.

And rights for women were also much better than in most Arab countries.

There were no equivalents of Malaysian “Ah Longs”. Loans were available to all citizens – at zero interest – by state-owned banks.

With access to shelter considered a human right in Libya, newlywed couples were given 60,000 dinar (about US$50,000) by the government to buy their first apartment to help start a family.

Before Gaddafi came to power, only 25 per cent of Libyans were literate. Now it is 83 per cent and a quarter of the 6.4 million population are graduates.

Electricity was free for all and farmers were given land, a house, machinery, seeds and even livestock to kickstart their ventures – without cost.

Libyans who bought cars got 50 per cent subsidy on the price of the vehicles and petrol was sold at $0.14 per litre.

The country had no foreign debts and had reserves amounting to $150 billion, all of which are now frozen mostly in Nato countries – which led the airstrikes in the war against Gaddafi’s regime.

But was the war morally right and legal in the first place?

The United Nations Security Council hastily passed two resolutions against Libya on the basis of unverified claims that Gaddafi “was killing his own people in Benghazi”.

But from the initial “limited role” of the “Responsibility to Protect (R2P)” principle as authorised by the UN, Nato’s role appeared to be more focused on the real motive: Regime change.

More than 30,000 Libyans have been killed – a large part of them civilians and thousands have been displaced from their homes in the wake of the more than 9,000 air strikes.

Entire cities have been wrecked along with roads, water and power supply systems.

As Chossudovsky explains it, the R2P military intervention was aimed at pinning Libya into the straitjacket of an indebted developing country, under the surveillance of Washington-based Bretton Woods institutions.

In a bitter irony, after having taken Libya’s oil wealth and its overseas financial assets, the “donor community” has pledged to lend it back to finance Libya’s post-war “reconstruction”.

The sad thing is the rest of the world does not have the power to demonise such actions.

M. Veera Pandiyan

The Star

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