 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we have with us Prof. Ajaz Ahmad and we'll discuss the larger scenario in West Asia, North Africa or what is called the Middle East. Ajaz with Qaddafi's execution and this really was an execution that was shown on television and various other YouTube and other places. What do you think has changed or do you think it is really scenario in Libya is at least not any different from what it was, what we discussed last time after the fall of Tripoli. Well one thing is that I think one of the major differences between the Bush regime and Obama regime is that the Bush regime used to kidnap people and render them for torture. Obama regime assassins and this they have done now twice. They did that with Osama bin Laden and they did that now with Qaddafi. He was alive, he was killed on the spot. That's one thing that I want to say about that. The other is that as we talked about last time inside there is not going to be a resistance of the Qaddafi loyalists and so on but my view is that there's going to be a lot of chaos in the sense that the very people who came together with the objective of overthrowing Qaddafi and now there's going to be I think a brutal fight over spoils in which various groups will form. The social cohesion that that dictatorship had provided in Libya among all the tribes and ethnic groups and regions and so on is probably going to fall apart. I don't think the Americans basically care about that so long as they have the oil secure and a major military base for NATO because their interest in Libya is twofold. One is the oil but the equally important is actually a major air base for the rest of Africa. The fallout of this sort of completion, let us say the transition from the previous regime to now I think is going to be largely in the neighborhood. I expect the whole of the Sahel to be intermoiled now. My sense is that there's going to be an arc of instability as the American phrase used to be about the Middle East all the way I think from Algeria to Uganda and southern Sudan. I think the scramble for the resources in Africa now is going to get speeded up enormously. So my sense is that the consequences of it for the rest of Africa especially in the Sahel and the one side, the East Africa and the other side and then in Algeria I won't be surprised if that Islamist insurgency starts coming back at what scale I don't know. It's interesting that you say that because there is also a lot of reports about now drone specific cockpits being built in different places what are called bases and it really is for Somalia, Ethiopia and this whole region. So Libya could in that sense fit into the larger... What we are seeing is the construction of an empire of drone land. Drone land, that's an interesting phrase. Okay, now coming back to the West Asia scenario which still remains the major political battlefield. It seems interesting that the Americans and the Turks, Turkey seems to have seen to have realigned themselves in terms of what you described earlier as Islamic moderate Islam being backed by Americans and in the sense that if you look at Syria for instance and what also is happening in Egypt there seems to be some realignment taking place of Americans trying to co-opt a certain kind of Islamic forces into their political agenda. I would say first of all that we are seeing a very interesting historically unique and for most people I think implausible coalition which consists of the Saudis and the Qataris on the one hand. The main NATO forces that is to say Western powers on the other, NATO Islamicists that is the Erdogan regime in Turkey, the Muslim Brotherhood and Israel. Each one of them has their own very different interests and but they are coming together in a very formidable way. And one of the things that is common between the Syrian and the Libyan situation for example is the emergence of Qatar. Qatari army was used, Qatari armed forces were used in Libya as part of the Arab League NATO sort of coalition. The ghaliyun, the major person being sponsored by the Americans, the ISIS in Syria is being bankrolled by Qatar. So Qatar, Saudi Arabia on the and we saw Saudi troops in Bahrain. So you have a very very powerful combination here and it's not fortuitous that Turkey is playing a very very serious role in bringing the Muslim Brotherhood to power in country after country. The role that Al Jazeera is playing because earlier it was seen as something which was different, which brought a lot of transparency to what is happening in West Asia. Now it seems to have become very close to what Al Arabia is. Actually Prabir, I was very angry with Al Jazeera from the beginning because Al Jazeera Arabic, well before they launched Al Jazeera English. I felt what played a very very cynical role in building up the jihadi Islamism and so on. The hellfire that Al Jazeera used to spit out on their Arabic channels in favor of all these people. The most fiery of the Brotherhood preachers had hours and hours of preaching on Al Jazeera. Al Jazeera was the agency through which Osama bin Laden used to release his videos and so on and so forth. When they came, when they started this English channel, the idea was to put on it a liberal dissident face. That face continued to operate in the early part of what came to be called the Arab Spring. That is to say during the Tunisian-Egyptian phase. But as soon as it came to the uprisings came to the Yemen, to Bahrain, the Saudi domain proper, Saudi and Qatari domains proper, all the pretense fell and then came Libya and now Syria. It's as dirty as Fox News. It has become openly an instrument of Qatari policy in that sense. Yeah, but interestingly, Qatari itself is a part of this whole coalition. So Qatari policy means Saudi policy, NATO policy means all of that. The other part of what seems to be happening, and this seems to be also part of American agenda, is to play also the various sectarian card or the confessional card which the French played for instance in Lebanon and Syria earlier, which is to try and build up the Sunni identity, the Shia identity and play one against the other. Do you see that also as a reason that Turkey and Saudi Arabia has played a certain kind of role and trying in that sense to build themselves up as a counter-poise to Iran? Well, let me make one more point about Al Jazeera and I'll reply to your question. Last week by all counts and really by all counts, there was a demonstration of a one million people in Damascus in favour of the South Government. Not a word on Al Jazeera. And not a word in the international press either? I mean international press of course, but international press meaning Western press and therefore international press, Indian press, international press. But this grand Al Jazeera that speaks for the Arab Spring and so on and so forth, Arab democracy and all that. A million strong according to any number of sources, the independent and so on. By the way, the Guardian has played a dreadful role as well, but coming back to sectarianism. This sectarianism has been a staple of Western policy. This is what the Americans did in Vietnam between the Buddhists and the Christians. This is what they did in Laos between the Montagnards and the rest. This idea that, this divided rule, you know, I mean the British are the ones who taught them all this. It was the British who taught them these things. So yes, that is going on. And that has immense ramifications. Any religion-based regime in the larger Middle East, as it is called, West Asia and North Africa, would be necessarily a sectarian regime. In Syria, over 20% of the population is not Sunni Muslim. I mean, if you include the Kurds who are Sunni, but they're not like Arab Kurds and so on. You're talking about 25% or so. And there are Christians, there are Druze, there are Alevis, there are a whole range of minorities. And the Muslim Brotherhood, Islam is a majoritarianism and a bit more brutal than RSS. So, I mean, it's not something that you can say moderate Islam. It's a very brutal form of majoritarianism. You just saw what happened in Egypt. If the Muslim Brotherhood really comes to power alongside these armed forces, cops will be put in their place. Less so in Egypt. In Syria, there will be a bloodbath. In fact, one of the issues is if there is a sectarian divide, which is accentuated by particularly the opposition that is coming back to the West, it's not only Syria, it's also Lebanon. And one of the chief conduits for supply of arms in Syria is the Hariri group in Lebanon, paid for by the Saudis and so on. Yes, it's going to be sectarian. And again, it is a long-standing imperial policy, but so is the Saudi Bahá'í policy, which they have not imported it from anywhere else. So, it's fairly homegrown as well. And that is why I believe that a secular modernizing regime anywhere in this whole part of the world has to have a very strong position on separation of religion and politics, whatever it takes to do it. The other appears to be forgotten regime in West Asia, in the midst of all the others is Yemen. Nothing has changed in Yemen. It's been backed, Saleh is being backed still by Saudi Arabia and of course the United States behind Saudi Arabia. Slotters have taken place of people protesting Saleh's regime. It doesn't seem that there is any change that's taking place there. Yemen is presented as some sort of a tribal outpost out there somewhere. Yemen is the only part of the Arab world which had a communist revolution in its southern part and had a republican revolution in its northern part. It is the defeat in that republican revolution that brought Saudi Arabia into Yemen as the dominant power. The great struggle between Nazarist secular republicanism, authoritarian republicanism and this Wahhabi Islam took place in Yemen. So Yemen has actually had a past of highly sophisticated political developments. Part of this Saleh and so part of the point of convergence between Saleh, Saudi Arabia and Americans and so on is to suppress all of that past and it is the brutality in suppressing all of that past that about half a dozen different kinds of opposition to the regime have arisen including the regional ones. The south was united, the north and south were united only around 1990s at some point and there's a very strong movement in the south to undo that unity. That great struggle is never reported on. Instead you get this Al Qaeda and you know Ablaki and so on and so forth. So the story is never told. One of the dreadful things that has happened is that in this discussion of of jihadism and moderate Islam and so on and so forth the actual political forces on the ground never get discussed. It's a very different kind of place than people imagine when they keep talking about this Al Qaeda and so forth. So the distinction with Yemen as a historical really with the historical past which goes back absolutely. You know when they talk about you know the great seafaring past of the Arabs the most prominent of them were the Yemenis. Yes. You know. I'm confused with that with the desert Arab kingdoms of Saudi Arabia. These are coastal people. These were trading coastal people who went trading all over the place. So in that sense the Arab Spring, the promise of Arab Spring has been at least partially defeated by the kind of regrouping that has taken place and accept that the fact that movements did emerge is something. The spring has been used to create the largest bridgehead that imperialism could have received on the African continent. That's in Libya. In Libya. Yes the Mubarak regime is gone but there's the military dictatorship. The real power of the U.S.-Israeli combined in Egypt has always been its alliance with the armed forces. They're in power. Their record so far is very discouraging. So in fact I think there has been largely a defeat. Well on that note we'll finish this part of the discussion. We'll come back for the second part of the discussion where we discuss what is happening in Syria.