Post-Gadhafi Libya Remains Adrift

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner

The Gaza war has sucked most of the news oxygen out of the Middle East. But there are troubles elsewhere, too.

Libya, which has been in a state of chaos since the downfall of Moammar Gadhafi in 2011, lurches from crisis to crisis. The economy is close to collapse; corruption and nepotism are widespread in the country. It iss divided by two rival governments, plus other militias. The battle for control over Libya crosses tribal, regional, political, and even religious lines.

In April, yet another United Nations special envoy for Libya was frustrated enough with the political situation in the fractured country to quit his job. After 18 months in the post, the Senegalese diplomat Abdoulaye Bathily said he had done his best to get the five key political actors in Libya to resolve contested issues over electoral laws, form a unified government and set the country on a path towards long-delayed elections.

“But my attempts were met with stubborn resistance, unreasonable expectations and indifference to the interests of the Libyan people,” he declared on April 16. He left behind a political process best described as moribund.

This was only to be expected. In 2020, Ghassan Salame resigned, saying that “for two years, I tried to re-unite Libyans and restrain foreign interference.”  It became too much for him, and he admitted that he could “no longer continue with this level of stress.” Salame was succeeded by Jan Kubis, who resigned in 2021, also citing health reasons.

Despite the backing of the Security Council, the special envoy’s impact has been limited for years, given that the country remains split between two rival governments: the UN-recognized one under President Abdul Hamid Dbeibah in Tripoli and a rival administration in Benghazi in the east led by General Khalifa Haftar, the commander of the Libyan Arab Armed Forces.

The five political actors Bathily referred to are President Dbeibah; General Haftar; Mohammed Takala, the chairman of the High Council of State; Mohamed Yunus al-Menfi, the president of the Libyan Presidential Council; and Aguila Saleh, an influential speaker of the House of Representatives in Benghazi.

Most international policymakers seem to believe that Libya’s rivals must themselves break the current impasse. The UN feels that progress is not possible without the approval of key powerbrokers and their international backers.

On the other hand, others believe the only realistic chance of ending the status quo is through an internationally mandated process. After all, the attempt to produce a government through Libyan institutions alone has served only to produce parallel governments and reintroduce administrative division. Unfortunately, Bathily seemed to conclude he had no option but to rely on existing institutional leaders.

In his final remarks to the UN Security Council, he criticized Libya’s leaders for “continuing to articulate preconditions for their participation in the dialogue as a way to maintain the status quo.” UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres appointed Stephanie Koury as Deputy Special Representative as a temporary officer in charge.

A new envoy will not have the luxury of time to slowly build a new process. The price of Libya’s tenuous stability has been widespread and growing corruption helping to entrench the governing elite. 

With foreign exchange reserves, vast natural resources, and a population of around seven million, Libya has remarkable per capita wealth. Yet, despite government expenditures continuing to rise, that wealth is not being sufficiently deployed in service to its population.

Lately, the growth in Libya’s kleptocratic sector has accelerated. This means that Libya is not heading for any new equilibrium or new order. Instead, there is a substantial risk that its current leaders might end up destroying the country’s most essential institutions, including the National Oil Corporation (NOC), which is responsible for almost all of the nation’s income.

Owing to the severity of the Libyan crisis’s most violent phases between 2014 and 2020, Washington and other Western capitals remain wary of a relapse into armed confrontation. Policymakers have therefore tended to focus their engagement on de-escalation and conflict mediation.

Kleptocracy, however, cannot be the basis upon which a functioning state is built: a corrupt bargain among Libya’s incumbent leaders does not constitute sustainable peacebuilding, especially given that no progress is currently being made in security sector reform or militia disarmament. It has led to an entrenched culture of impunity.

Libya has become a conduit for vast, sprawling illicit networks where smugglers move drugs, arms and people. Such a political culture is unable to respond to crises. Last September, torrential rains brought by a major Mediterranean storm led to the failure of a series of dams near the coastal city of Derna.

The sudden, overwhelming flooding that followed washed whole neighborhoods into the sea, leading to perhaps as many as 20,000 deaths. The volatility of recent years meant the country’s separate regimes and their feckless officials have left critical infrastructure in a state of neglect. Derna itself was the site of a brief takeover by an Islamic State offshoot in 2014.

“Between 2011 and 2014, there were already concerns about the state of Libyan infrastructure,” Mary Fitzgerald, a Libya expert at the Middle East Institute, explained. “And then Libya went through a six-year civil conflict from 2014 to 2020 and a lot of infrastructure was damaged during that conflict.” And it isn’t being rebuilt.