At the time the papers said that “they came in triumph”; Cameron and Sarkozy went to Tripoli and Benghazi around a year ago in order to accept the cheers of a war-weary crowd and to “hail a new dawn for Libya”. one year on celebrations of the “triumph of liberation” from Cameron et al have been non-existent. Not surprising really, for the greater population of Libya, the “liberation” and its aftermath has brought nothing but more misery.

After six months of fighting, the Libyan ‘rebels’ are celebrating their victory over the once all-powerful Gaddafi, who for 42 years had been flouting the western democracies, and playing cat and mouse with their leaders. He was also a member of the Socialist International. The democracies, in fat years and lean, had made every effort to get into the good books of Libya’s Guide, but from the moment when a real popular revolt against the Libyan dictator’s Jamahiriya regime was turned into a sinister struggle between factions of the bourgeoisie, they have been giving their active support to the Transitional National Council (TNC).

We are publishing here the statement on the war in Libya put out by the KRAS, the Russian section of the anarcho-syndialist International Workers’ Association. The ICC warmly welcomes the internationalism which animates this statement. This doesn’t surprise us, because in the past the KRAS has consistently defended internationalist positions: in 2008 against the war in Georgia, and before that against the wars in Chechnya in the 1990s, rejecting any political support for the different warring bourgeois camps.