Is Libya Going to be Ruled by Another Gadhafi?

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript

Is the past going to be prologue, politically, in many failed states around the world? We’ve already seen the return of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Now, unbelievably, we might once again see a Gadhafi running Libya, a decade after a NATO-led campaign to eliminate dictator Moammar Gadhafi. And it may even occur via that panacea of western liberals, free elections.

In 2011, the international community supported rebel forces against Gadhafi. Hopes of democracy and stability have yet to be fulfilled.

During the Arab Spring in February 2011, Libyans took to the streets to protest against the country’s authoritarian ruler, who had been in power since 1969. The protests escalated into a military conflict, with part of the army joining opposition rebel groups and the other part remaining loyal to the regime.

On March 17, 2011, the United Nations passed a resolution allowing for measures to establish a no-fly zone to protect the civilian population. Two days later, the United States, Britain and France launched airstrikes. On March 31, NATO took sole command of international air operations over Libya.

NATO support proved vital to the rebel fighters. In October, they entered Gadhafi’s hometown of Sirte and a last heavy battle took place, ending with his capture and killing on October 20. A picture of the dictator’s bloodied face went around the world.

To many politicians in the west, his death represented an opportunity for a new beginning, but it was not to be. The country devolved into rival militias, representing tribes and ideological factions, with opposing camps claiming legitimacy.

The UN-recognised Government of National Accord (GNA) was based in the capital, Tripoli, while a House of Representatives, which did not recognise the Tripoli administration, was located in Tobruk, loyal to the military strongman Khalifa Haftar and his Libyan National Army.

External actors, in particular Turkey and Qatar on behalf of the GNA, and Egypt, Russia, and the United Arab Emirates supporting Haftar, became involved in the near-anarchy that had become the norm.

But last October a fragile ceasefire between the two Libyan sides went into effect. On March 10 of this year, a government of national unity headed by Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah was formed. It replaced the two rival administrations that have been ruling Libya since 2014 and is part of a UN-backed plan to lead the conflict-ravaged country through elections by the end of the year.

They were scheduled for Dec. 24 but have been postponed. Is this setting the stage for a return of the Gadhafi family?

Ten years ago, a month after Moammar Gadhafi’s regime collapsed, a band of armed rebels ambushed a convoy near the Libyan desert town of Awbari that was fleeing south toward Niger. The gunmen captured Seif al-Islam el- Gadhafi, the second son of the notorious dictator and one of the rebels’ chief targets.

He had been widely seen in the West as the country’s best hope for incremental reform. He spoke the language of democracy and human rights. But when the revolution came, he enthusiastically joined the regime’s brutal crackdown.

The rebels flew him to Zintan, and people didn’t know if Seif was dead or alive. But it turns out that he is now free – and planning a comeback.

Libya has not been a functioning state since 2011, and so disillusioned are most Libyans with the post-Gadhafi chaos they have begun to warm up to him.

Though he remains wanted for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court, many Libyans now express “confidence” in him. He has stated that he wants to restore the “lost unity” of the country.

“There are people in Libya who would agree that, given the events of the past few years, the country was better off under Gadhafi,” according to Tim Eaton, a senior researcher at Chatham House, the London-based Royal Institute of International Affairs.

Sami Hamdi, managing director of International Interest, a global risk and intelligence company in London, speculates that “a number of international actors are willing to employ him as a potential card,” and he may well be the candidate that both Turkey and Russia decide to try to elevate in Libya. A sad state of affairs, indeed.

 

Poland and Hungary Are Dissatisfied with Their EU Status

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottown, PEI] Guardian

A new framework for the relationship between the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia, known as the Visegrad Group, was established in 1991. The four had always been part of a single European civilization sharing cultural and intellectual values and common religious traditions.

The objective at the time was to promote the European integration of the four countries, following the collapse of the Soviet-controlled Communist bloc. They had returned to a democratic Europe after decades of Soviet domination.

The tragic historical experience of the new member states gave them a strong sense of the positive nature of their regained national sovereignty. This set them apart from the Western European members of the EU who founded and shaped it.

Today these four nations are members of the EU and NATO, and so have become part of the post-Soviet European framework. But of late two of them, Poland and Hungary, are finding EU membership a threat to their hard-won post-Communist sovereignty.

As Frank Furedi notes in his book Populism and the European Culture Wars: The Conflict of Values Between Hungary and the EU, the contrast is between the largely top-down value system of the EU “empire” and the elites that subscribe to it, versus the organic values of the national community.

Poland and Hungary have been at odds with the Commission over issues ranging from media freedoms, migration, LGBTQ rights to judicial independence.

The 2008 economic crisis and the 2011 Euro debt crisis made them wonder whether the older EU members, in particular Germany, were reliable partners. The consequent adoption of austerity policies in the EU strengthened this assumption.

The 2015 refugee and migration crisis added to their unease. Their approach diverges significantly from that of the EU bureaucracy in Brussels. They mostly disagree with quota principle of distribution of refugees and migrants.

The outcome of the 2016 Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom also increased their Euroscepticism. Increasingly worried about their national identity, they now chafe at the EU’s operating institutional framework, which overrides many of their own political goals.

Poland, by far the largest Visegrad member, is also the country currently most unhappy with EU membership. Its nationalistic Law and Justice Party (PiS) threatens to part ways with Brussels. And Hungary, ruled by the Hungarian Civic Alliance-Fidesz, is not far behind.

Poland’s parliament has now passed a law allowing border guards to immediately expel migrants who cross the border illegally. It also has said it will build a fence on its border with Belarus.

Since August, there have been more than 16,000 attempts to cross the Belarusian border illegally compared with just 120 for the whole of last year.

Poland and the EU have accused Belarus’s authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko of facilitating an influx of thousands of migrants. He is trying to destabilise neighbouring member states as a form of retaliation against sanctions.

Poland and Hungary are also furious at a report presented last July by the European Commission on the state of the rule of law in EU member states. It described the situation in Poland and Hungary, in particular, as highly problematic. Among other things, it demanded judicial reform in both countries. Otherwise, EU funding of tens of billions of euros in post-pandemic recovery funds would be in danger.

In December 2020, all 27 EU member states had agreed to link respect for the rule of law to the access of EU funds. Hungary and Poland only consented on condition they were allowed to challenge this in court.

Warsaw and Budapest called the July ruling an example of bad faith, blackmail, political attack, and double standards. The Polish government argued that national judiciary systems fall outside the scope of EU authority.

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki therefore requested a review of the decision of the EU’s Court of Justice that gave EU law primacy.

Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal on Oct. 7 ruled that key articles of one of the EU’s primary treaties were incompatible with Polish law, in effect rejecting the principle that EU law has primacy over national legislation in certain judicial areas.

The Constitutional Tribunal is now dominated by judges who are sympathetic to the party, one of whom was appointed illegally, according to the European Court of Human Rights.

But the European Commission responded quickly, asserting that the Court of Justice has primacy over national courts or constitutional tribunals in member countries. The Commission has said it would take steps to enforce its judgments.

Meanwhile, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban signed a resolution Oct. 9 supporting the Polish court ruling. “Efforts are being made to deprive member states of powers they never ceded to the EU without amending the EU treaties and through creeping extensions of competences,” it stated.

Orban appears to positively relish antagonising the EU, regularly vetoing EU attempts at a unified front on foreign policy.

An article in Magyar Nemzet, a newspaper allied with Orban’s party, in August argued that “it’s time to talk about Huxit.” This, as well as “Polexit,” are seen in some quarters as a possibility, though still remote.

 

Tensions are Heating up in the Taiwan Strait

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript

In early October, there were four straight days of incursions by Chinese aircraft into Taiwan’s defence zone, with almost 150 aircraft sent in total.

Beijing is becoming increasingly concerned that Taiwan’s government is moving the island towards a formal declaration of independence and wants to deter President Tsai Ing-wen from taking any steps in that direction. Tensions have mounted over a possible Chinese invasion.

Formally, Taiwan is the “Republic of China,” which traces its history back to the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911 and, therefore, a rival government to the one in Beijing.

But most nations recognise the government in Beijing as the sole Chinese government. Just 15 nations, most of them small island states in the Caribbean or Pacific, have diplomatic relations with Taiwan. 

Elsewhere, Taiwan’s de facto embassies generally use the name “Taipei,” its capital, to describe the island, to ensure that host nations do not upset the Communist “People’s Republic of China.”

So at the heart of the divide is that the Chinese government sees Taiwan as a breakaway province that will, eventually, be part of the country again.

“Taiwan independence separatism is the biggest obstacle to achieving the reunification of the motherland, and the most serious hidden danger to national rejuvenation,” Chinese President Xi Jinping stated on Oct. 9.

Many Taiwanese people disagree. They feel they in effect have a separate nation, whether or not independence is ever officially declared.

So he got an angry reaction from Taipei a day later. Addressing a National Day rally, Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen reiterated that “nobody can force Taiwan to take the path China has laid out for us.”

Who is right? While Taiwan lies barely 160 kilometres off the Chinese mainland, the first known settlers in Taiwan were Austronesian tribal people.

Even in the 16th century, as European countries such as Portugal and the Netherlands were developing trading links in the region, Chinese mariners and traders gave Taiwan a wide berth.

But after a relatively brief spell as a Dutch colony from 1624 to 1662, Taiwan was administered by China’s Qing dynasty until 1895.

From the 17th century, significant numbers of migrants started arriving from China. Most were from Fujian province or Guangdong. As this increased, so did conflict with the indigenous aboriginal tribes.

In 1895, Japan won the First Sino-Japanese War, and the Qing government had to cede Taiwan to Japan. The new rulers also approached the aboriginal peoples warily. Their districts were closed to outsiders. 

On the mainland, the Qing dynasty collapsed in 1911, to be succeeded by the Republic of China under the rule of the Kuomintang, or Nationalist Party.

After World War Two, Japan surrendered and relinquished control of Taiwan. Under Chiang Kai-shek, Beijing again began ruling the island.

The Taiwanese had been expecting liberation from Japanese rule to lead to self-government, not the imposition of another regime. This culminated in major riots in 1947, in which as many as 20,000 Taiwanese lost their lives. 

When the Communists gained control over the mainland by 1949, some one million mainland Chinese fled to Taiwan and took complete control. In 1949 martial law was imposed, not to be lifted until 1987.

In 1996 the Taiwanese were finally able to choose their own president through direct elections. Since then, democratic governance has taken firm root.

Modern Taiwanese are overwhelmingly ethnically Chinese, but a growing majority consider themselves Taiwanese, not Chinese, and proud of their country’s history and identity. China refuses to accept this

Is a peaceful solution possible? In the book Right-Sizing the State: The Politics of Moving Borders, one of the editors, Brendan O’Leary, notes that states usually resist contraction.

But this is correct “only if states regard all their territories as intrinsic parts of their identity. Plainly the historical record suggests that some territories are more expendable, more suitable for load-shedding than others. States will, it seems, adjust their external borders if the benefits from doing so outweigh the costs.”

Might China not be better off foregoing its claim to Taiwan, with the island nation concurrently ceasing to call itself the rival “Republic of China,” in a grand bargain? It might make sense, but it’s unlikely to happen.