Victory! Gaddafi State TV Shut Down

As the Gaddafi Regime lost its legitimacy through ongoing violence against the Libyan people, the country’s state run TV continued to broadcast rosy visions of reality and was used by the regime to incite violence against innocent Libyan civilians.  Indeed, Gaddafi himself has gone on state TV repeatedly to threaten Libyan citizens and encourage his supporters to find and murder those who oppose him.

To increase impact, Gaddafi banned all media broadcasts inside Libya except for his state channels, which all rely on Nilesat, an Egyptian company, satellites to broadcast... But even as the violence incited by Gaddafi translated into horrendous atrocities, Nilesat refused to cut off Gaddafi’s TV.  Abdel Hafiz Ghoga, vice chairman of Libya’s opposition party, the National Transitional Council (NTC), repeatedly requested that Nilesat take Gaddafi’s channels off the air, saying that the regime had “without a doubt used media as a weapon, as a bullet” to spread its propaganda.

Now, after dozens of organizations called on Nilesat to do the right thing, and more than 60,000 people in more than 100 countries around the world demanded action, Nilesat has finally been forced by a court in Cairo to stop transmitting all 14 Libyan state television channels.

Carol Hilson, one of the creators of the petition on Change.org, cites the success of the Egyptian Nonviolent Revolution and Gene Sharps’s explanation of nonviolent uprisings as her inspirations to get involved.  In “From Dictatorship to Democracy,” Sharp argues that nonviolent uprisings are the best way to successfully overcome oppressive regimes and create lasting democracy.  He observes that:

“... the limited degree of departure from their normal lives may make participation in the national liberation struggle much easier for many people.”
Thus Hilson, along with Brazillian advocate Sebastiao Nascimento, decided to take action by starting the petition, for the Libyans were “ordinary people just like me trying to win their freedom peacefully, so helping them became personal pretty fast.

She cites the energy still flowing from Egypt’s Nonviolent Revolution as a powerful motivational tool in getting people to sign the petition as well as the notion of fighting violence with nonviolence.  “It feels satisfying that 60 thousand+ people had an opportunity to speak out against injustice,” says Hilson.  “It feels very satisfying that the courts in Cairo finally stepped in and forced NileSat to stop broadcasting. That is collaboration at its best.”

So thank you to the 60,000+ activists who helped make this happen.  This is an important and crucial step in ending the violence against the Libyan people.