Wednesday, November 13, 2013
Libya almost Imploding, Status Quo Unsustainable
By Nicola Nasser*
More than two years on since the
“revolution” of Feb. 2011, the security crisis is exacerbating by the day
threatening Libya with an implosion charged with potential realistic risks to
the geopolitical unity of the Arab north African country, turning this crisis
into a national existential one. Obviously the status quo is unsustainable.
“Libya is imploding two years after the former Libyan
leader Muammar Gaddafi” was captured and killed on October 20,” Patrick
Cockburn wrote in British The Independent on last Oct. 10.
On this Nov. 11
Reuters reported that Protesters shut Libya 's
gas export pipeline to Italy ,
its only customer, in the Mellitah complex, some 100 km west of Tripoli
It is noteworthy here that while the U.N.
Support Mission in Libya can obviously “support” nothing, France, Italy,
the UK and the U.S., who spearheaded the NATO campaign to topple the former
ruling regime, in a joint statement on this Nov. 8, expressed their concern “at
the instability in Libya and the threat that (it) poses to the successful achievement of the
democratic transition” and reiterated their “support to the elected political
institutions,” i.e. to Zeidan’s government.
Ironically, Zeidan on this Nov. 10 warned
his compatriots of a possible “intervention of foreign occupation forces” in order to protect civilians under
Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter because “the international community cannot
tolerate a state in the middle of the Mediterranean that is a source of
violence, terrorism and murder,” which was the same pretext for the NATO
military intervention that contributed mainly, if not created, the security
crisis in the first place by destroying the military and police infrastructure
of the central government and turned the country practically into a sponsor of
regional terrorism in general and an exporter of arms and “Jihadists” to Syria
in particular.
Zeidan’s warning of foreign
“intervention” could also be interpreted as an implicit threat to ask for it to
help rein in the security crisis lest it boils to an implosion of the country.
Forbes on last Aug. 30 reported that
Libya’s “energy protection” was failing and quoted PM Zeidan as saying that his
government would impose “order by force” when it came to protecting the oil and
gas industry and expanded the Petroleum Facility Guards (PFG) to 18,000 members.
Months on, his efforts and threats failed
to deter targeting pipelines, refineries and export terminals. His renewed threats since early last September to “bomb from the air and the sea”
any oil tanker entering Libya’s territorial waters illegally and trying to pick
up illicit Libyan oil have proved hollow and without teeth.
On last Oct. 18, CNBC.com
quoted Paolo Scaroni, the CEO of the Italian oil and gas firm ENI,
which is Libya's largest foreign partner, as saying: “Everyone
is going to be wealthy” in Libya, citing statistics of what could be: “Five
million people and 2 million barrels of oil (per day), which means that this
country can be a paradise, and I am doubtful that Libyans will not catch this
opportunity of becoming the new Abu Dhabi, or the new Qatar or the new Kuwait.”
Libyan Copy of Iraq
Yet Libyans seem
determined to miss “this opportunity.” “Revolutionary” Libya, reminiscent of the U.S. - engineered
“democratic” Iraq after some ten years of the U.S. invasion, is still unable to
offer basic services to its citizens. Real unemployment is estimated at over
30%. Economy has stalled and frustration is growing. Gone are the welfare days
of Gaddafi’s state when young families could get a house with benefits for
free, people’s medication and treatment were paid by the state and free
education made available to everyone. About one million supporters of the Gaddafi
regime remain internally displaced; hundreds of thousands more fled for their
lives abroad.
Remnants
of the destroyed institutional infrastructure of law, order and security is hardly
capable of protecting the symbolic central government in Tripoli ,
reminiscent of its Iraqi counterpart, which is still besieged in the so-called
“Green Zone” in Baghdad Libya
“Libya
On last Aug. 30, the
Swiss-based group Petromatrix said: “We are currently witnessing the collapse
of state in Libya
Ironically, an
estimated one-quarter of a million heavily armed militiamen, who are
the main obstacle to creating and empowering a central government, are on
government payroll.
Writing in The Tripoli Post on
Oct. 31, Karen
Dabrowska said that, “Local notables, tribal groups, Islamists and militias are
all vying to keep the centre from extending its authority to their fiefdoms and
this explains why disparate social groupings can only unite temporarily to
prevent the centre from gaining power over them.”
It “goes without
saying that the post – Moammar Gaddafi Libya is purely a failed state” governed
by militia, Adfer Rashid Shah of the Jamia Millia Islamia, Central University in New
Delhi, wrote on last Oct. 15.
Following the
heavy infighting in the Libyan capital on this Nov. 7, Italian foreign minister Emma
Bonino told newspaper La Republicca that the country was
"absolutely out of control” and the situation is worsening, hinting that Italian oil and gas firm ENI was prepared to
close its oil wells.
Zeidan’s abduction from his Tripoli
Last July Zeidan threatened that his
government may have to “use force” in Benghazi, the cradle of the “revolution”
and the current focus of insecurity, tribalism, separatism, Islamist rebels,
decentralization of government, assassination of regular army and security officers
and attacks on foreign diplomatic missions who mostly closed their consulates
in Libya’s second largest city, where the U.S. ambassador was killed in
September last year.
Ahead of his visit to the eastern city on
Monday, when he promised reinforcements and logistical support to the security
forces there, Zeidan launched a show of force into the city the previous Friday
with hundreds of armored troop carriers and army trucks mounted with guns.
But Zaeidan’s threat to “use force” will
inevitably be counterproductive, not only because his government’s lack of
“force” would compromise his credibility, but because, within the current
balance of power between his government and the militias, it will make the
security situation worse if it does not ignite a civil war.
Zeidan said his government would give the
“revolutionaries” who have turned into rival and vying militias and warlords until
next Dec. 31 to join the regular army and police or they will be cut from
government payroll, that is if his coffers could afford to sustain their
payroll if they accepted and if they did not accept his offer it will be
another reason for more mutiny and rebellion.
More likely the government payroll may
not be rolling because the government is facing a budget crisis and “from next or the following month, there could be a problem
covering expenditure” according to Zeidan himself, as the security
crisis has brought oil production to a standstill or out of its control because
the “militia groups are behaving like terrorists, using control over oil as
political leverage to extract concessions,” according to Dr. Elizabeth
Stephens, head of political risk at insurers Jardine Lloyd Thompson, quoted by
British The Telegraph on last Aug. 29.
An imminent constitutional crisis could
create a power vacuum that in turn would worsen the security crisis. Published
by RT on this Nov. 7, analyst Nile Bowie wrote: “In accordance with the
transitional roadmap adopted by the transitional government in May 2011, the
mandate of the current government in Tripoli Tripoli
Pentagon’s Plans No Help
Short of western “boots on the ground” it
is doubtful that Zeidan’s government will survive. The U.S. administration of President Barak Obama was
repeatedly on record against any U.S.
boots on the ground in the Middle East . With
the exception of France ,
which might be ready for the appropriate price to repeat its recent limited and
temporary military intervention in Mali ,
Europe seems against it too.
Zeidan, with less than three months
remaining for him in office, seems relying on Pentagon’s plans to arm and
train, through “AFRICOM,” a new Libyan army called “a general purpose force.”
But “the case of a separate and
underreported U.S. effort to train a small Libyan counterterrorism unit inside
Libya earlier this year is instructive,” Frederic Wehrey wrote recently in Foreign
Affairs, adding: The absence of clear lines of authority — nearly
inevitable given Libya’s fragmented security sector — meant that the force’s
capabilities could just have easily ended up being used against political
enemies as against terrorists. In August militias launched a pre-dawn raid on
the training camp which was not well-guarded. There were no U.S. soldiers at the camp, but the militia took
a great deal of U.S. U.S. decided to abort the program and the U.S.
The obvious alternative to Zeidan’s
western supported government would be a stateless society governed by militia
warlords, while the survival of his government promises more of the same.
At the official end of the NATO war for
the regime change in Libya on Oct. 31, 2011 U.S. President Obama proclaimed
from the White House Rose Garden that this event signaled the advent of “a new
and democratic Libya,” but more than two years later Libya is recurring to the
pre-Gaddafi old undemocratic tribal and ethnic rivalries with the added value
of the exclusionist terrorist religious fundamentalism wearing the mantle of Islamist
Jihad.
In the wake of late Libyan leader Muammar
Gaddafi’s death on
October 20, a Saudi Arabian Arab News’ editorial said: “The point about
Qaddafi’s death is that it makes the next transition stage that much easier,
that much safer. As long as he remained at large, he would have been in a
position to destabilize the country.” More than two years after Gaddafi’s death,
Libya
* Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Birzeit,
West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. nassernicola@ymail.com
