An Open Letter To President Obama On The Libyan War

Mr. President,

It is with a bleeding heart that I am writing you this letter, asking you to please listen to the message the U.S. House of Representatives sent to you yesterday (24/06/2011), rejecting the text authorizing military intervention of the United States in Libya, and to end the current aggression against the Libyan people with the most extravagant excuses like that of protecting them.

Three years ago you ignited the entire continent of Africa during the presidential primaries of the Democratic Party. When you were elected president, we believed that we had seen a son of Africa who had succeeded and could now serve as a reference for a billion Africans. You seemed to be one of those heroes we never knew, because those heroes of ours have become legends for the emotion aroused by their short life (all killed by the Europeans). With your election as President of the United States of America, we instantly believed that we have seen this semi-Black God Africa has been searching for all these shameful years of contact with Europe.

Yes Mr. President, we knew quite well that you were elected by the Americans to protect the interests of your country, but what do you want? To think that you could also be our President, you had our genes; you are also our Black brother is a dream we all had with our eyes well opened. We have all seen you as one of us, as someone who was able to understand the wounds and sufferings of the Africans better than any other powerful individual on earth.

On January 20, 2009, you sworn on the Bible of your illustrious predecessor, Abraham Lincoln, becoming the 44th President of the United States of America; this highly evocative gesture symbolized in our eyes, the hope of meeting and reconciliation which never took place between Europeans and Africans, between Whites and Blacks. That day marked for the American people and African people, the bound of a painful past, hoping to start a fraternity based on a relationship of mutual respect, a more just and equal one.

But after more than two years of your presidency, the heat you have aroused in our hearts in Africa, quickly turned into a cold shower and the fire of hope that you had known quickly turned off on us by the destructive tide of the ocean of your bombs against the African people (120 Cruise missiles overnight in a capital: Tripoli). The more we got to know you through your real actions in Ivory Coast and Libya the more we are afraid of you. Your African politics which is soiled with arrogance and the tendency you have to hide behind powers in crushing the weak will make you to be remembered in history, as a contradictor to the path taken by President Abraham Lincoln.

We were not expecting much from you as we are accustomed to bear our cross without screaming, without whining, without complaining, but we were hoping at least, that you would be neutral in the Oppressed-Oppressors' relationship, still raging today between Europe and Africa. To our surprise, you have chosen your side, that of our oppressors. And you have put substantial resources in place to curb our desire for emancipation, to suffocate our momentum of freedom…

Professor Jean-Paul Pougala – Geneva, 25 June 2011

Translated from Italian by Piervincenzo Canale and Ewanfoh Obehi Peter