 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. We have with us Prof. Vijay Prashad from Trinity College Carniticket. Vijay, good to have you back with us. Thank you. The NATO war against the Libyan regime seems to be going on and it doesn't seem to have produced anything concrete. Starting with supposedly protecting civilians at the moment it seems to be targeting the deletion stations, gazing infrastructure, for that this is where it stays. What is happening in Libya at the moment? Well, the US military commander, that is the highest person in the military infrastructure, Admiral Mike Mullen, last week said that the Libyan conflict has entered a stalemate situation. I mean, we have been talking about a stalemate for several weeks but now he has said so himself. So I think we should start from that baseline. The military conflict is at a stalemate. The political situation is separate and we can get to that. There remains, of course, a new fighting in the western hills, in the Nafusa mountains, where the people of the Kabil communities are fighting still. But largely the military question is at a stalemate. In the middle of all this, of course, there's the killing of the senior leader of the rebel forces and that has been followed by the bombing of the Libyan broadcasting authority. 15 people, I think, have been injured, 3 people have been killed and the reason the British have said that they bombed the Libyan broadcasting authority was because they said they want to cut off Gaddafi's ability to talk directly to the people. They say that he's speaking incitement and incitement should be shut off. Others in Benghazi say that the assassination of Abdul Fattah Yunus, the head of the Libyan rebel command, took place by a group that was communicated to from Tripoli via Libyan state television and may have been coded statements, etc. So the whole thing has become very bizarre at the level of what people are saying. Certainly there is a military stalemate, certainly there is a political dialogue that is happening and yet it's only happening in fits and starts and finally this assassination of Abdul Fattah Yunus has most people on all sides deeply confused. If you look at it, the whole argument was that the civilians had to be protected. Now NATO is clearly on one side of the civil war. So the pretence of protection of civilians is gone. What we have really is a civil war in which NATO is on one side. Would that be a correct representation of the military situation? Well, let's say that this NATO conflict in Libya has been going on for 120 days. Perhaps NATO's attempt to protect civilians lasted for about 48 hours. It certainly didn't last for more than a few days because very soon after, at least I think by the 21st of March, very soon after NATO had sent in airships to provide aerial support for the rebels as they advanced on Misrata. So it was clear from within 48 hours, 50 hours or so, after the UN resolution 1973 and after the French first started bombing over Libya, it was very clear that NATO had taken a position on behalf of the rebels. And then very soon after that, the language of the heads of state of the main NATO countries, that is to say the French, the United States and the British, their language had made it clear when they said things like Gaddafi must go and that there needs to be a major change in Libya. So from a military position of supporting the rebels, then to political support for the rebels, and finally they corralled the head of the International Criminal Court, Moreno Campo, who began to open the dossier to investigate war crimes against Omar Gaddafi, and of course Mr. Moreno Campo at no point has opened the dossier to investigate civilian killings by NATO aircraft. So it was a very one-sided investigation by the International Criminal Court and therefore militarily, politically and in terms of international law, it was clear that the G7 countries and NATO had come into a civil war on one side and was no longer following the UN's philosophy of responsibility to protect. It's an interesting issue that you raise about the International Court of Justice because if you really look at the drone attacks taking place in Afghanistan and Pakistan, we have had drone attacks to kill five children because they were working close to where a suspected terrorist is supposed to have been. So effectively all this, if we take into account what the international law is, these are all war crimes in any case on which nobody seems to be bothered about. Well, you know, last year Philip Alston, who was the UN special raconteur on extrajudicial killing, released a report on drone attacks and he suggested at the time that it was in his very guarded language, it was more than likely that the utilization of unmanned aerial vehicles such as drones were a contravention of international law. In other words, drone attacks are illegal. Based on that, a group in England by the name of Reprieve has opened a criminal, you know, has submitted a criminal complaint against on the one side the drone operators who fired on one particular family in northern Pakistan and secondly against John Rizzo, who's the general counsel at the CIA and admitted to Newsweek Magazine in February that he had signed off on drone attacks. So there is movement in the United Nations and in the courts in Britain to open prosecutions on the drone attacks. But there is utter silence in the International Criminal Court on questions of drone attacks, on direct evidence of attacks on civilians in Iraq. You know, people have come to the International Criminal Court based on the WikiLeaks release of a videotape demonstrating a missile fired into a civilian car and Mr. Moreno Campo has not taken that case up, has not even opened a dossier. You know, even, you know, Mohammad Gaddafi's daughter Aisha Gaddafi submitted a complaint in the International Criminal Court about the killing of her children and her nieces and nephews by NATO bomb attack on Gaddafi's compound and as far as I know, no dossier has been opened on that either. The people have been complaining that the International Criminal Court which is an excellent idea, has been suborned to the logic of NATO. After all, the ICC provided NATO legal cover during the war in Kosovo when the ICC opened dossiers on various Yugoslavian and Serbian military commanders including, of course, you know, Milosevic and then commanders who have been recently turned over to the ICC. Furthermore, the African Union has said that why is the International Criminal Court emphasizing prosecutions in the continent of Africa and at the same time not opening any cases having to do with, say, the United States in Iraq or Afghanistan. So this is a very broad and direct challenge to the ICC for what many people consider straightforward hypocrisy. Vijay, coming back to the political issue, it's very clear militarily there is now a stalemate which is difficult to break unless NATO is prepared to put large number of boots on the ground. Given this, do you see this sort of de facto bifurcation of Libya for some foreseeable future and sort of settling down on that level or do you see something else likely to happen in the medium term? Well, the immediate thing to point to is that the UN's envoy has been shuttling between Tripoli and Benghazi and that's Mr. Khatib who has a very good record in terms of his ability to talk to various sides. So one has to say that there is some hope that between the African Union and the United Nations they have been trying to open a political dialogue between Benghazi and Tripoli. So that's the first thing to keep in mind. It's not that the doors have been closed to some kind of diplomatic settlement. The second thing is that it appears that Mr. Gaddafi told the UN envoy that he is willing at the present time to consider stepping down but he wants to remain in Libya. Now, when this statement came out, the British Foreign Ministry and the International Criminal Court said that this cannot take place because after all Mr. Moreno Campo has framed a warrant for the arrest of Mr. Gaddafi. So they have taken off the table the potential of an important building block for bringing the two sides together. So one has to now go back to the International Criminal Court, I think. I mean, I'm hoping that the BRICS countries will take this up with Moreno Campo to actually back off from that warrant, to enable inside Libya some kind of confidence building to take place between the two sides. So there is an opening. If this opening is not allowed, certainly the partition of Libya is going to take place and that is a very sad situation. It proves to us that aerial bombardment of this kind, intervention in civil wars of this kind is going to lead to the breakup and destruction of states that have some viability. And we see that of course in Yugoslavia and it is clear that this is exactly what has happened in Iraq. Iraq is putatively one country, but really effectively it is at least two countries. The Kurdish region is entirely autonomous from the writ coming from Baghdad. So if the way forward is to bomb and then break up countries, this is the model. But I think still there remains another alternative. There remains a different path and I think it is for us to articulate how the African Union and the United Nations envoy are trying to work on that path. They have been given no credence by the international media and they have been given no space by the NATO command which has utterly discounted the work of the EU and the UN envoy. Thank you, Jay. We will come back to you on this issue again. I think this Libya issue is not going to go away immediately. Thanks a lot. Well, not for another 100 days.