The Libyan “revolution”: come to the dark side we have ice cream

Allow me to intro­duce you to Libya’s Al-Naseem Ice-cream and Dairy Factory:

With more than 95% of the staff are Libyan nation­al­ity, and the pres­ence of chem­i­cal and safety lab­o­ra­to­ries, the Libyans like to call Al-Naseem the proud of the Libyan indus­try. This is an Eng­lish lan­guage intro­duc­tion video to Al-Naseem Fac­tory owned by Raiedha fam­ily clan.

Like such many fac­to­ries in the Third World, the qual­ity is always an issue, here is man pho­tographed his ice cream com­plains that it misses the bis­cuit cone (image). Another Libyan trans­ferred to the hos­pi­tal with food-poisoning after eat­ing con­t­a­m­i­nated yoghourt pro­duced by Al-Naseem Factory.

Despite the above Al-Naseem Dairy and Ice cream Com­pany won the B.I.D. Inter­na­tional Qual­ity Award in New York 2010 com­pet­ing against 65 dif­fer­ent countries.

But there is a dark side of the Ice cream:

In an arti­cle called “The secrets of the Libyan war”, Al-Kifah Al-Arabi mag­a­zine reveals Al-Naseem Factory’s role before the start of the “rev­o­lu­tion” in Libya:

The spark that ignited the cur­rent Libyan clashes as a pre­text for for­eign inter­ven­tion began on the port of Mis­rata city …

Weeks before the start of the Libyan rev­o­lu­tion, the port of Mis­rata used by the rebels to smug­gle con­tain­ers full of weapons, ammu­ni­tion and explo­sives with coop­er­a­tion of the rebels sym­pa­thiz­ers port’s managers …

… The arms con­tain­ers emp­tied at Misrata’s port with­out going through any cus­toms inspec­tion and kept in the Al-Naseem’s under­ground stores, later the arms trans­ported to Benghazi,Tripoli and other cities in Dairy trucks to be dis­trib­uted among the rebels at the first days of the revolution”.

The ques­tion asked by the mag­a­zine is: Where did these arms come from?

Post-embargo era Libya was inter­ested in dis­trib­ut­ing its invest­ment in a bal­anced man­ner between devel­op­ment and arms, oil con­tracts with China, arms con­tracts with Rus­sia, and bil­lion dol­lars con­tracts with Ger­many from wind-farms, to about 12 Ger­man oil com­pa­nies active in Libya (here is an excel­lent book “The Libyan econ­omy: eco­nomic diver­si­fi­ca­tion and inter­na­tional repo­si­tion­ing” explain the suc­cess of the Libyan eco­nomic process).

Also a good arti­cle about “Ger­many inter­ests in Libya” on WSWS.org and why Euro­pean coun­tries affected by these con­tracts moved to encour­age the rebels liv­ing abroad Islamists inside Libya to start their “revolution”.

The inter­view with Ali Al-Tarhouni the head of the finan­cial and eco­nomic affairs in the Libyan National Tran­si­tional Coun­cil telling Ger­man news­pa­per Zeit, gives us a clear indi­ca­tion on who is behind the arms containers:

I think that coun­tries such as France who helped us in the very early stage [of the rev­o­lu­tion] will reap the ben­e­fits of this posi­tion … Our most beau­ti­ful beaches in the world are very close to Europe … We want to estab­lish a finan­cial cen­ter in col­lab­o­ra­tion with inter­na­tional investors…

Al-Kifah Al-Arabi also reported the following:

….. Among the arti­cles shipped to the rebels there at least 1000 “Thu­raya” cell phones dis­trib­uted among the rebels days before the start of the cri­sis in Libya.

“Thu­raya” cell tele­phones are dis­trib­uted among the rebels to receive or con­nect to any place in the world with­out the need for local net­works and the Libyan gov­ern­ment was sus­pi­cious about the sud­den increase in Thuraya’s net­work traf­fic, that is why the Libyans started to jam Thuraiya’s com­mu­ni­ca­tion as reported on Al-Khaleej Times days before the “revolution”.

The pop­u­lar­ity of Thu­raya phones among the rebels is men­tioned here in this Nytimes story:

.… Took him up to the hotel’s inter­net café and tried to help him arrange a Skype chat which didn’t go through. Some­one even­tu­ally brought the pilot a Thu­raya satel­lite phone which he used to call his family.

Just like the Iraq’s sce­nario the British-French attack on Libya came in a period of which Libya wit­nesses a boom in con­struc­tion and build­ing the infra­struc­ture that attract inter­na­tional com­pa­nies seek­ing to sign con­tracts with Libya, but the British and the French shares in these con­tracts were not significant