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Libya’s Double Tragedy

Jul 10, 2020 Amin Saikal

Libya's plight resembles that of other war-torn countries in the Greater Middle East: internal conflict has spiraled out of control because of misguided foreign intervention. With Turkey and Egypt now locking horns in the country, Libya's agony is even less likely to be resolved at the ongoing UN talks in Geneva.

PERTH – The plight of oil-rich, tribally segmented Libya resembles that of several other war-torn countries in the Greater Middle East, namely Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemen. In each case, a combination of internal strife and misguided external intervention has sustained a long-running conflict.

Recalling the US-led invasions of Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003) in his 2014 memoir Duty, former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates argued that the United States was good at overthrowing a regime, but had no idea what should take its place. The reason, Gates argued, was that the US failed to consider national and regional complexities. The same was true of the 2011 NATO-led military intervention in Libya.

The ongoing Libyan crisis has both internal and external origins. Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi’s dictatorship was toppled in October 2011 in a popular uprising during the so-called Arab Spring. And Qaddafi fell as a result of a US-backed, Anglo-French armed intervention that the United Nations Security Council had authorized on the basis of the “responsibility to protect” the Libyan people.

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Gareth Evans Jul 13, 2020

In his otherwise compelling piece on Libya, Amin Saikal repeats without qualification the proposition that Gaddafi's fall was the result of the military intervention authorised by the UN Security Council “on the basis of the ‘responsibility to protect’ the Libyan people”. In so doing he, no doubt unintentionally but very effectively, reinforces the still unhappily widespread perception that the responsibility to protect (‘R2P’) principle which was unanimously embraced by the General Assembly in 2005 is liable, at least in its extreme-case military applications, to do more harm than good.

What went wrong in Libya in 2011 was not the granting or exercise of the original mandate, invoking R2P, given by the Security Council to “take all necessary measures…to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack”. There were at the time almost universally held fears of an imminent massacre by Gaddafi forces marching on Benghazi; the resolution was not opposed; and it was immediately successfully implemented. And the operation was widely hailed at the time as the coming of age of R2P, demonstrating that with quick and robust collective action, the horrors of Rwanda and Srebrenica could indeed be made a thing of the past. It is impossible to know how many thousands of lives were saved in Benghazi by that initial intervention in Libya, but certainly credible to say that had the UN Security Council acted anything like as swiftly and robustly in the 1990s, 8,000 men and boys in Srebrenica, and close to 800,000 men, women and children in Rwanda, would still be alive today.

Rather, what really went wrong – apart from all the other missteps after Gaddafi’s eventual overthrow to which Professor Saikal properly refers – was the determination of the United States, UK and France to transform the limited civilian protection mandate conferred by Resolution 1973 into an open-ended regime-change one, without being willing to explore alternative approaches, and without allowing any serious further debate. This was deeply resented by the ‘BRICS’ states in particular (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), all of whom happened to be on the Council at the time. Not least did it upset South Africa, which wanted to explore with Gaddafi the possibility of a ceasefire and peaceful political transition. Whatever one may have thought then, or may think now, about its likely prospects of success, It should have been given the opportunity to do so before further full-scale war=fighting action was taken.

Having talked at the time to nearly all the participants in this debate, my own strong belief is that the breakdown of Security Council consensus over the Libyan mandate was, unquestionably, the major factor in the failure of the Council to agree on any response at all – even just a condemnatory resolution – when the Syrian situation started to explode in mid-2011. The BRICS took the view, whether one regards this as too obdurate or not, that they were not going to concede an inch if there was any chance that the P3 would take that inch to run a mile. It was around this time that I heard France, the United Kingdom and United States being widely referred to around UN corridors by a new acronym: not as the ‘P3’, but as the ‘FUKUS’ group. Such were, and unhappily remain to this day, the passions on this subject.

In the fifteen years since its initial embrace at the 2005 World Summit, R2P remains work in progress. As a normative principle – that mass atrocity crimes perpetrated behind sovereign state borders are not just that state’s but the world’s business – its acceptance, as evidenced by annual General Assembly debates and scores of Security Council resolutions, is almost complete. As an effective preventive force, and as a catalyst for institutional change, it has had many identifiable successes. But as an effective reactive mechanism, when prevention has failed, the record - since the Libyan case ran off the rails in mid=2011 – has been manifestly poor, above all in Syria. In the present international environment – with China and Russia now behaving as they are – it will be a long and difficult process to recreate any kind of Security Council consensus as to how to react to the hardest of cases, when external military intervention may be required to stop a genocidal catastrophe. But the beginning of wisdom will be for the P3 to own up to all its own past misjudgments in Libya in 2011, and for the history of those watershed events to be, once and for all, fully understood.

Gareth Evans

Chair, International Advisory Board, Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect; former Australian Foreign Minister; President Emeritus, International Crisis Group
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j. von Hettlingen Jul 11, 2020

Amin Saikal says what has helped sustain the nearly decade long conflict in Libya is “a combination of internal strife and misguided external intervention.” There is no military solution to the conflict. Yet in the absence of national unity, the country faces the risk of balkanisation. Saving the situation would “require outside forces to withdraw and let the Libyan people determine their own future.” However their oil resources and geostrategic significance have become “a magnet” for foreign actors and “a curse.”
According to the author, Libya’s “plight” resembles that of several other war-torn countries in the Greater Middle East – Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemen. The only difference is that Libya is oil-rich. Muammar Gaddafi ruled the fragmented Libya with an iron fist for 42 years, keeping control over its tribes and clans, and quelling Islamist militants. Since his death in 2011, attempts to democratise the country failed and Libya descended into anarchy, perpetrated by many militant groups. Various factions are fighting over the country’s oil resources, using them as bargaining chips to press financial and political demands.
Since 2014 a new civil war has been fought mainly between the rival governments in east and west Libya: the UN-backed administration in Tripoli – the Government of National Accord (GNA), is led by Fayez al-Sarraj, and the Tobruk administration in the city of Benghazi, which had appointed Khalifa Haftar to lead the Libyan National Army (LNA). The GNA holds little power on the ground, and some distrust its Islamist politics. Haftar sees himself as a bulwark against extremism, while critics see him as another would-be military dictator.
Over the last few years foreign powers have increasingly intervened in Libya’s civil war to defend their own strategic and economic interests. The GNA has the backing of Turkey, Qatar and Italy. The LNA enjoys the support of Russia, Egypt, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and to a lesser extent, France. The author says the US has “oscillated” between the two camps, although Trump had seemingly voiced a preference for Haftar, a US citizen and a former CIA asset, who stands in the way of peace in Libya.
External actors have flooded Libya with weapons and drones, ignoring a UN arms embargo. Russia has sent mercenaries and Sudanese men have been recruited to fight alongside the LNA, while Turkey sent Syrian fighters along with its own soldiers, to defend the Tripoli government.
Haftar’s recent loss has enabled Turkey to expand its air operations in the conflict on behalf of the GNA, since its intervention in January. The LNA’s foreign backers may have to reconsiderate their support for Haftar, who has been seen more of a burden than an asset.
The author worries that economic interests – the exploration of oil and gas” – in Libya might lead to a clash between Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The “LNA currently controls (along with a large chunk of territory stretching east to Libya’s border with Egypt). Although neither Turkey nor Egypt would likely want a direct military confrontation, especially given their severe domestic problems, their posturing” could seriously destabilise the North African and Mediterranean region.
“The absence of a national, regional, and international consensus has meant that the UN-sponsored peace talks in Geneva have so far failed to produce any tangible results, with intransigence by one side or the other torpedoing the negotiations. The stalemate has left Libya in the grip of long-term structural instability and insecurity, with little prospect of returning anytime soon to a degree of normalcy that could provide its suffering people hope.”
The recent escalation in fighting came despite increased international pressure on both sides to return to negotiating a political settlement and to halt the violence over concerns about the spread of Covid-19. As high-profile peace talks in the past had not resulted in any lasting truce, it is unlikely that fighting will end anytime soon in Libya. Last month Haftar agreed to a ceasefire, put forward by Sisi, but the Turkish-backed GNA rejected the proposal.
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