Yes. Kaddafi went to that Arab Muslim conference, hoping to take over as leader of the movement. Instead, he was reviled and made fun of because of his strange garb and his girl security guard.
So, he decided to become the leader of a pan-African movement, Arabs and blacks working together, instead of Arabs trying to conquer and enslave blacks. He hired many black Africans to work in the oil fields, and he had many projects like the one you reference, to improve the lives of those in the region. Most Arabs really hated that.
And NATO was used to destroy the infrastucture of a country, the carcass of which is now being fought over by the fanatics. Gaddafi offered to share the technology of the Great Underground River project with Egypt. Couldn’t have that, not with Mubarak and his 30 year peace with Israel. Now Egypt cannot feed itself, and tourism is nil. Are we awake yet?
It gave the fanatics an excuse to slaughter the foreign african workers:
excerpt
During the civil war, African migrant workers suffered the worst of the violence. Racist hatred was fueled against them by a myth spread most notably by Al Jazeera that African migrant workers in Libya were actually Gaddafi’s hired mercenaries. This racist violence was wrought with a vengeance against the 35,000 citizens living in the city of Tawergha. The Tawerghans were forcibly removed from their homes, a few were executed, and the rest were sent away never allowed to return. Their crime was their supposed support for Gaddafi. Vijay Prashad in Arab Spring, Libyan Winter writes of one incident that took place in the days before the bombings began, when protesters executed 50 “African Mercenaries” at a police station in the province of Cyrenaica. During the bombings, NATO showed no compassion towards the African migrant workers. Horace Campbell, in Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure of Libya writes, “More than 900 Africans drowned in the Mediterranean Sea, trying to escape the fighting in Libya. In one spectacular incident, two survivors reported the tragic story of a boat carrying 72 African immigrants that ran into difficulty trying to reach the Italian port of Lampedusa. The Africans on board, including women and children, were left to drift in the Mediterranean for sixteen days after a number of European military units apparently ignored their cries for help. Two of the nine survivors claimed this included a NATO ship. Despite alarms being raised with the Italian coast guard and the boat making contact with a military helicopter and a warship, no rescue effort was attempted.” This wanton disregard for human life is emblematic of the entirety of the NATO intervention. It was a horrific affair with tens of thousands massacred. In the letter published by U.S. President Barack Obama, French President Nicholas Sarkozy, and British President David Cameron, the three announced that they “would not rest” until, “the Libyan people can choose their own future.” During the fall of Gaddafi’s capital of Tripoli, mobs of barely armed Gaddafi supporters, ordinary citizens of the Libyan city of Tripoli, rallied to defend Gaddafi’s compound Bab al-Aziza. There they were attacked by the full might of NATO’s arsenal. Some 63 bombings were undertaken targeting the supporters at the compound in a single 24-hour period. Apache gunships and drones were used to attack this mass of what were technically “combatants” so that now “the Libyan people can choose their own future.”
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WHAT IS NATO NOW?