POPE BLASTS DEMOCRACY APROACH TO LIBYA

POPE BLASTS DEMOCRACY APROACH TO LIBYA KAMPALA – The head of the Catholic Church, Pope Francis has questioned the way the West was trying to export its model of democracy to Libya, saying that it had not respected the country’s political ways of life. Western involvement in Iraq, too, was criticised, reported the Libya Herald on Wednesday. “Faced with current Islamist terrorism, we should question the way a model of democracy that was too Western was exported to countries where there was a strong power, as in Iraq, or Libya, where there was a tribal structure,” he said. Speaking to the French Catholic newspaper La Croix in an interview about illegal migration into Europe and whether Muslims and Christians could live side by side harmoniously, the pope said that Western intervention to remove Muammar Gaddafi had resulted in making the situation worse. “As a Libyan said recently, ‘We used to have one Gaddafi, now we have fifty’,” Pope Francis is reported as saying. The contribution of Libyans to the Libyan revolution had not been recognised by the West, nor that tribalism was only a part of Libya’s political culture. The remarks appeared to have been primarily for a European audience as the pope also criticised Christian nationalism on the continent, reported the Herald. “When I hear talk of the Christian roots of Europe, I sometimes dread the tone, which can seem triumphalist, or even vengeful. It then takes on colonialist overtones,” he said. Praising the election of London’s new mayor, Sadiq Khan, the city’s first Muslim mayor, the pope said it showed Muslim integration in Europe was working. The other side of the coin, however, was of Muslim migrants being ghetto-ised in some parts of Europe and then some of them being alienated. “In Brussels, the terrorists were Belgians, children of migrants, but they grew up in a ghetto. In London, the new mayor took his oath of office in a cathedral and will undoubtedly meet the queen. This illustrates the need for Europe to rediscover its capacity to integrate.”