They Did It Their Way

Trust the opposition in Canada's Parliament to raise hair-splittingly-stupid questions of governing Conservative Cabinet Ministers to make headlines for themselves, claiming superior humanitarian concerns over that of their political rivals. Cheap tricks betraying their own tired lack of moral concern and information-investment on what is going on, wherever it is going on.

Anything to get themselves noticed

Just as well that Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird has a nimble mind and an agile tongue. Asked in the House of Commons about his presumed lack of concern over the manner in which Moammar Ghadafi met his death, he responded with alacrity and a sense of due proportion. "My first thought is with the Libyan people, not with their former dictator." Admirable perspective and reflective response.

That a rebel militia just happened to be on the scene when a NATO bomber struck a convoy thought to be of suspicious origin, and which just incidentally was comprised of escaping regime supporters, including Col. Gadhaffi, causing them to take shelter away from the convoy under a bridge culvert where they were later discovered by that militia represented a set of circumstances begging for a decisive conclusion.

That this was a militia originally from Benghazi where the rebellion originated, representing people who had been badly oppressed and repressed by Gadhaffi, in the background of a country where tribal resentments and offences by one tribe against another are never forgotten, might be thought to have predicted the outcome of a young well-armed and pumped-for-victory rebel executing the former tyrant immediately the opportunity arose.

Condemning the situation that arose, where a murdering tyrant was shot point-blank on capture by an enraged rebel won't change the situation. Col. Gadhaffi will not, now, be tried in a court of law, either in Libya nor at the International Court in the Hague, in a long-drawn-out conflict of accusations, denials, defence and outrage. His end reflected that of Romania's Nikolai Chauchesku, rather than the mockery-trial of Yugoslavia's Slobodan Milosevic.

The execution of a mad dog dictator who became a helpless prisoner of the very people whose lives he made a misery did not follow the carefully set international rules of engagement-and-disposal of a former ruler-become-prisoner. It represented tribal justice. Libya society does not yet, and may never quite, represent a civilized, law-and-order society based on democratic enlightened rule.

John Baird, reflecting the concerns of NATO and the free, enlightened world that adopted the 'Right to Protect' concept in the United Nations, placed focus where it deserved to be recognized; the rule of humanitarian law which trumped that of the rule that no former head of state no matter how despicable, can be disposed of summarily, without standing trial and being lawfully judged.

R2P protects a population against the depraved harm done them by a ruler.

Libya's people judged their Glorious Leader of the Revolution. And they did it their way. Tch, tch.