Saturday, November 03,

Col Gaddafi of Libya Writes $40 Milliom Epic "Dhulm"(Injustice) Critical of Italy

The ANNOTICO Report

 

This Report from a British Newspaper is the Height of Atmospheric  Hypocrisy.

 

The mercurial dictator of Libya, Col Gaddafi has written a script "Dulhm" (Injustice) that is critical of Italy's occupation of Libya for 20 years up until 1943. Peter Popham a Brit has the audacity and unmitigated gall to speak unusually critical and demeaning of Italy as a colonizer. 

 

Popham incredibly ignores not only Britains Imperialism and Colonization over the Entire globe, including the Northern Hemisphere, out posts in China, All of India, and Africa.

Starting from the relative top of Africa to the bottom, the countries that were under British control in Africa alone were at one time or another were; Egypt, Gambia, Togo land, Sudan, Sierra Leone, Gold Coast, Nigeria, Cameroon, Somaliland, Uganda, Kenya, Tanganyika, Northern Rhodesia, Bechuanaland, Nyasa Land, South West Africa, Rhodesia, South Africa

 

 

The "Scramble for Africa", a phrase used to describe the sometimes frenzied claiming of African territory by half a dozen European countries that resulted in nearly all of Africa becoming part of Europe's colonial empires. The Scramble began slowly in the 1870s, reached its peak in the late 1880s and 1890s, and tapered off over the first decade of the 20th century.

The Berlin West Africa Conference (November 1884-February 1885) involved representatives of 14 European countries and the United States. The Ottoman Empire, facing the loss of territory on all sides, was not represented at the conference. European power were negotiating which could rightfully claim lands inhabited by Africans!!!

The "Scramble" involved European armies using modern weapons to crush opposition and install authority over the continent's inhabitants. The largest colonialists were Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, Portugal and the Ottoman Empire until 1922.

On the eve of the Scramble, Western Europe was a century into the Industrial Revolution and clearly the most powerful and technologically advanced portion of the globe, especially in  firearm, transportation, and communications technologies. Europeans worried about over-production and finding consumers for all their goods European viewed these Africa as both markets for their products and as suppliers of natural resources to fuel the industries. In addition, the strongest European countries began fearing what would happen to the balance of power if their rivals acquired colonies in Africa. National pride was at stake. So was Christianity:

For Popham to be so harsh, especially when Britain had agreed to Italy's occupation of Libya, Ethiopia, and Somalia, and in light of Britains Imperialistic Empire on which the "Sun never Set" is inexcusable!!!!!!!!

Scramble for Africa: http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761595444/Scramble_for_Africa.html

 

Gaddafi turns Screenwriter for $40m Epic About Italian Invasion

 

Independent - London,England,UK 

By Peter Popham in Rome

November 03, 2007

The mercurial dictator of Libya has reinvented himself yet again. He has been a pariah of the West; a sponsor of terrorism; the maverick autocrat with his corps of female bodyguards; the man who comes to Brussels for a summit, erects his tent and puts his camels out to graze in the local park.

Thirty years ago with his little Green Book  and his "Third Universal Theory", he proposed himself as the Mao Zedong of the Middle East, fashioning what he claimed to be a new ideology from the patriarchal customs of his clan.

But today Libya is in a different place. The worst of its diplomatic headaches are behind it  Lockerbie dealt with, the nuclear plants dismantled, the Bulgarian nurses ransomed  and the world is keen to do business. And now the ruler is trying on a new hat. Meet Muammar al-Gaddafi: screenwriter.

A series of impressionistic sketches he has written evoking his country as it was on the eve of invasion by Italy in September 1911  placid, rustic, traditional  and then as it roused itself to fight to expel the foreigners, is to become the basis for a film costing at least $40m (?19.1m) which begins shooting in Libya next year.

Aimed principally at a non-Arab audience, and entitled Dhulm  Years of Torment, it will tell the story of Libya's traumatic experience at the hands of Europe's Johnny-come-lately imperialists.

To the other European powers, it was hard to take Italy seriously as a colonial force. Its first adventure, against the supposedly easy target of Ethiopia, ended in the worst defeat ever suffered by a European army in Africa. Libya, just across the pond from Sicily, was thinly defended by a small Turkish garrison, at a time when the Ottoman Empire was on its knees. It was expected to be a pushover.

Instead, after quick early success, Italy found itself embroiled in an insurgency that dragged on for the next 20 years. The Libyans became the first people in the world to know the terror of air bombing, among the first to be gassed from the skies, and were early guinea pigs for the concentration-camp concept. Unable to break their spirit, Italy resorted to driving them across the border into Egypt and Chad. Ramzi Rassi, the Lebanese producer of the new film, says that by the time the Italians fled home in 1943, one-third of the Libyan population had been killed and one-third forced into exile.

In his treatment for the film, Gaddafi describes the beauty of his land before the coming of the new Romans. "Tripoli ... a string of white buildings painted with the local lime ... Behind it stretches the deep blue sea, its light waves shimmering, and much clearer in the distance the wide open horizon..."

Seen from the other side of the Mediterranean it all looked so different. For Italy, unified for a bare half century, the invasion of the Ottoman province of Tripolitana e Cirenaica was a chance to prove its worth as a martial country. "The great proletarian nation has stirred!" declared Giovanni Pascoli, the Italian poet, as the invasion got under way.

Dhulm ("injustice" in Arabic), will tell the story of the invasion and the long Libyan resistance through the eyes of those who experienced it, based on real people. One of the main characters is an extraordinary journalist called Francis McCullagh from Dungannon in Co Tyrone, who really deserves a biopic all to himself. In October 1911, his zest for action unsated, he crossed the Mediterranean with the invading Italians. "He came over with the invasion force," says Mr Rassi, "and later wrote a book about the invasion almost in the form of a script. He is one of the characters in the film, as an eye-witness of what happened."

Dhulm is not Col Gaddafi's first venture into film. In 1980 his regime paid $30m to make Omar Mukhtar: Lion of the Desert, an epic about Omar the Bedouin schoolteacher who became the legendary leader of the Libyan resistance, and fought on well into his seventies until he was captured by the Italians and hanged in front of 20,000 of his Bedouin followers. Lion had an improbably glittering cast, including Anthony Quinn as Omar, Oliver Reed as the Italian commander who tries to track him down and Rod Steiger as Mussolini. But Arabs were deeply unpopular at the time of its release in 1983 thanks to Opec's price rises and other factors (including Gaddafi himself), and the film sank without trace.

Is the world readier now to hear Libya's tale of woe? Mr Rassi says it should be. "We see Armenians and Jews talking about genocide  Libya wants the truth about what happened there to be exposed, too. It's not just Gaddafi but the people as a whole: the degree of popular support for the film project is huge. And the international politics are more favourable to the idea of the film today than ever before."

Yet the first stumbling block is Italy, which shows little inclination to confront what it did across the water. Mr Rassi and the director of the film, the star Syrian TV film-maker Najdat Anzour, were in Rome this week promoting Dhulm, but with the exception of one piece by an Arab journalist, the film project has been ignored. Italian politicians are willing to talk about reparations, including a Gaddafian proposal that they build him a whopping autostrada, gratis  but just don't mention the war. When Lion of the Desert was released, it was banned in Italy on the grounds that it was "damaging to the honour of the Italian army" and has still never been shown there.

But it is time Italy made the effort  and the rest of us, too: not merely to recognise the suffering inflicted, to understand better what this country went through, and how the bitterness of a people subjected to such treatment can fester for generations without a full accounting. But also to understand and deal with the delirious joy that accompanied the rape of Libya.

Begun on the cusp of the First World War, the Libyan invasion incubated the bacillus of Fascism. And the horror of it was meat and drink to Europe's new utopians. Another journalist who crossed the Mediterranean to report on the war was Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, poet and founder of the Futurist movement. For him, the Italian forces behaved far too well: he denounced their "stupid, colonial humanitarianism". He believed more violence was required. "We want to glorify war," ran the Futurist Manifesto, "the only source of hygiene in the world  militarism, patriotism, the destructive act." For these Europeans, Libya's "liberation" was the apogee of modern civilisation.

Now of course we know different. "It was one of the ugliest forms of colonialism," says Mr Rassi, "with a scale of brutality that is unimaginable, covering the whole population. Yet very little is known about it. It is easy to understand why."

 

The ANNOTICO Reports Can be Viewed (and are Archived) on:

Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com [Formerly Italy at St Louis] (7 years)

Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com (3 years)

Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net