Tony Karon: Echoes of Spain in Libya's Civil War?
[Tony Karon is a senior editor at TIME, where he has covered international conflicts in the Middle East, Asia, and the Balkans since 1997.]
Addressing the rag-tag citizens' army on the barricades of Madrid in 1936 preparing to face the fascist army massed to storm the city, Dolores Ibarruri -- the revolutionary better known as La Pasionaria -- laid out the creed of those who would give their lives to defend Spanish democracy: "It is better to die on our feet than to live on our knees!"
That same heroic spirit of defying the military odds because of the intolerable price of surrender has been much in evidence over the past week in Zawiya and Ras Lanuf, Brega, Bin Jawad, and many other Libyan towns where rebels have risen the cast off the shackles of Colonel Gaddafi's tyranny.
Gaddafi has failed to crush the rebellion that has raged for two weeks, although his attempts to do so have left many hundreds of Libyans dead. But the fierce fighting that sees the towns of the country's Mediterranean coastline changing hands day by day suggests that the dictatorship is not about to collapse. Instead, the conflict appears to be morphing from an insurrection into a more protracted civil war for control of territory, with neither currently strong enough to deal a knockout blow.
That's a common scenario when a rebellion fails at the first attempt to dislodge those in power, but remains intact and armed. Indeed, in some ways it resembles the early stages of the Spanish Civil -- but in reverse...
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Addressing the rag-tag citizens' army on the barricades of Madrid in 1936 preparing to face the fascist army massed to storm the city, Dolores Ibarruri -- the revolutionary better known as La Pasionaria -- laid out the creed of those who would give their lives to defend Spanish democracy: "It is better to die on our feet than to live on our knees!"
That same heroic spirit of defying the military odds because of the intolerable price of surrender has been much in evidence over the past week in Zawiya and Ras Lanuf, Brega, Bin Jawad, and many other Libyan towns where rebels have risen the cast off the shackles of Colonel Gaddafi's tyranny.
Gaddafi has failed to crush the rebellion that has raged for two weeks, although his attempts to do so have left many hundreds of Libyans dead. But the fierce fighting that sees the towns of the country's Mediterranean coastline changing hands day by day suggests that the dictatorship is not about to collapse. Instead, the conflict appears to be morphing from an insurrection into a more protracted civil war for control of territory, with neither currently strong enough to deal a knockout blow.
That's a common scenario when a rebellion fails at the first attempt to dislodge those in power, but remains intact and armed. Indeed, in some ways it resembles the early stages of the Spanish Civil -- but in reverse...