Libya's civil war: That it should come to this | The Economist - 3 views
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It is split between a government in Beida, in the east of the country, which is aligned with the military; and another in Tripoli, in the west, which is dominated by Islamists and militias from western coastal cities
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Benghazi is again a battlefield.
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The black plumes of burning oil terminals stretch out over the Mediterranean.
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Libya looked like the latest fragile blossoming of the Arab spring
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Army commanders, mostly of Arab Bedouin origin, refused orders to shoot the protesters
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the revolutionaries cobbled together a National Transitional Council (NTC) claiming to represent all of Libya
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Volunteers from students to bank managers took up arms, joining popular militias and only sometimes obeying the orders of defecting army commanders trying to take control
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In August Western bombing of government bases surrounding Tripoli cleared an avenue for the revolutionaries to take the capital.
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Recognised abroad, popular at home and enjoying the benefits of healthy oil revenues—97% of the government’s income—the NTC was well placed to lay the foundations for a new Libya
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he judges, academics and lawyers who filled its ranks worried about their own legitimacy and feared confrontation with the militias which, in toppling Qaddafi, had taken his arsenals for their own.
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militia leaders were already ensconced in the capital’s prime properties
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The NTC presided over Libya’s first democratic elections in July 2012, and the smooth subsequent handover of power to the General National Congress (GNC) revived popular support for the revolution.
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Islamist parties won only 19 of 80 seats assigned to parties in the new legislature, and the process left the militias on the outside
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The Homeland party, founded by Abdel Hakim Belhad
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tried to advertise its moderation by putting an unveiled woman at the head of its party list in Benghazi
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The incumbent prime minister, Abdurrahim al-Keib, a university professor who had spent decades in exile, fretted and dithered
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He bowed to militia demands for their leaders to be appointed to senior ministries, and failed to revive public-works programmes
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which might have given militiamen jobs
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Many received handouts without being required to hand in weapons or disband, an incentive which served to swell their ranks
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the number of revolutionaries registered with the Warriors Affairs Commission set up by the NTC was about 60,000; a year later there were over 200,000. Of some 500 registered militias, almost half came from one city, Misrata.
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In May 2013 the militias forced parliament to pass a law barring from office anyone who had held a senior position in Qaddafi’s regime after laying siege to government ministries.
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In the spring of 2014, Khalifa Haftar, a retired general who had earlier returned from two decades of exile in America, forcibly tried to dissolve the GNC and re-establish himself as the armed forces’ commander-in-chief in an operation he called Dignity
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The elections which followed were a far cry from the happy experience of 2012. In some parts of the country it was too dangerous to go out and vote
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Such retrenchment has been particularly noticeable among women. In 2011 they created a flurry of new civil associations; now many are back indoors.
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Turnout in the June 2014 elections was 18%, down from 60% in 2012, and the Islamists fared even worse than before
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Dismissing the results, an alliance of Islamist, Misratan and Berber militias called Libya Dawn launched a six-week assault on Tripoli. The newly elected parliament decamped to Tobruk, some 1,300km east
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Grasping for a figleaf of legitimacy, Libya Dawn reconstituted the pre-election GNC and appointed a new government
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So today Libya is split between two parliaments—both boycotted by their own oppositions and inquorate—two governments, and two central-bank governors.
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The army—which has two chiefs of staff—is largely split along ethnic lines, with Arab soldiers in Arab tribes rallying around Dignity and the far fewer Misratan and Berber ones around Libya Dawn.
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Libya Dawn controls the bulk of the territory and probably has more fighters at its disposal.
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General Haftar’s Dignity, which has based its government in Beida, has air power and, probably, better weaponry
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the Dignity movement proclaims itself America’s natural ally in the war on terror and the scourge of jihadist Islam
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Libya Dawn’s commanders present themselves as standard-bearers of the revolution against Qaddafi now continuing the struggle against his former officers
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Ministers in the east vow to liberate Tripoli from its “occupation” by Islamists, all of whom they denounce as terrorists
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threatens to take the war to Egypt if Mr Sisi continues to arm the east. Sleeping cells could strike, he warns, drawn from the 2m tribesmen of Libyan origin in Egypt.
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Yusuf Dawar
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The struggle over the Gulf of Sirte area, which holds Libya’s main oil terminals and most of its oil reserves, threatens to devastate the country’s primary asset
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And in the Sahara, where the largest oilfields are, both sides have enlisted ethnic minorities as proxies
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ibya Dawn has drafted in the brown-skinned Tuareg, southern cousins of the Berbers; Dignity has recruited the black-skinned Toubou. As a result a fresh brawl is brewing in the Saharan oasis of Ubari, which sits at the gates of the al-Sharara oilfield, largest of them all.
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Oil production has fallen and become much more volatile
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oil is worth half as much as it was a year ago
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The Central Bank is now spending at three times the rate that it is taking in oil money
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The bank is committed to neutrality, but is based in Tripoli
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Tripoli may have a little more access to cash, but is in bad shape in other ways
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Fuel supplies and electricity are petering out
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Crime is rising; carjacking street gangs post their ransom demands on Twitter
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In Fashloum
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residents briefly erected barricades to keep out a brigade of Islamists, the Nuwassi
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“No to Islamists and the al-Qaeda gang” reads the roadside graffiti
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Libya’s ungoverned spaces are growing,
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Each month 10,000 migrants set sail for Europe
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On January 3rd, IS claimed to have extended its reach to Libya’s Sahara too, killing a dozen soldiers at a checkpoint
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The conflict is as likely to spread as to burn itself out.
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the Western powers
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have since been conspicuous by their absence. Chastened by failure in Afghanistan and Iraq, they have watched from the sidelines
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Obama washed his hands of Libya after Islamists killed his ambassador
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Italy, the former colonial power, is the last country to have a functioning embassy in Tripoli.
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Even under Qaddafi the country did not feel so cut off
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Dignity is supported not just by Mr Sisi but also by the United Arab Emirates, which has sent its own fighter jets into the fray as well as providing arms
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The UAE’s Gulf rival, Qatar, and Turkey have backed the Islamists and Misratans in the west
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If oil revenues were to be put into an escrow account, overseas assets frozen and the arms embargo honoured he thinks it might be possible to deprive fighters of the finance that keeps them fighting and force them to the table
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Until 1963 Libya was governed as three federal provinces—Cyrenaica in the east, Fezzan in the south and Tripolitania in the west
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The old divisions still matter
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the marginalised Cyrenaicans harked back to the time when their king split his time between the courts of Tobruk and Beida and when Arabs from the Bedouin tribes of the Green Mountains ran his army
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Tensions between those tribes and Islamist militias ran high from the start.
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July 2011 jihadists keen to settle scores with officers who had crushed their revolt in the late 1990s killed the NTC’s commander-in-chief, Abdel Fattah Younis, who came from a powerful Arab tribe in the Green Mountains. In June 2013 the Transitional Council of Barqa (the Arab name for Cyrenaica), a body primarily comprised of Arab tribes, declared the east a separate federal region, and soon after allied tribal militias around the Gulf of Sirte took control of the oilfields.
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In the west, indigenous Berbers, who make up about a tenth of the population, formed a council of their own and called on larger Berber communities in the Maghreb and Europe for support
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Port cities started to claim self-government and set up their own border controls.
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Derna—a small port in the east famed for having sent more jihadists per person to fight in Iraq than anywhere else in the world
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opposed NATO intervention and insisted that the NTC was a pagan (wadani) not national (watani) council
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Some in Derna have now declared their allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the caliph of the so-called Islamic State (IS) in Syria and Iraq.
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In December the head of America’s Africa command told reporters that IS was training some 200 fighters in the town.
