Oct 198 min read

DREAMS AND REALITY CLASHING: Libya’s Hard and Uncertain Road to Democracy.

On the 15th of September 2011, in the midst of the Arab Spring which was sweeping the Middle East and infusing its peoples with hope for a brighter, democratic future, the then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy stood before a bewitched crowd of

Libyans in the city of Benghazi, and said to them: “France, Great Britain, Europe (sic) shall always stand by the side of the Libyan people!”. Next to Sarkozy stood the then- Prime Minister of the United Kingdom David Cameron, who moments before his French counterpart saluted the “courage of lions” displayed by Libyans in their fight for freedom. The triumphant address by the two leaders was followed one month later by the assassination of Muammar Qaddafi, who had ruled over Libya as an autocrat since 1969 after his coup d’état against King Idris’ regime. With Qaddafi dead and Franco- British support for regime change, the stage seemed finally set for the building of democracy. Or so wishfully thought the Libyans.

A decade after the Libyan Spring, Libya has had nine governments, seen the rise of no less than 142 political parties, and been torn apart by years of a fratricidal war whose outcome is still under negotiation. In short, Libyan democracy was derailed off its course – assuming it ever stood a chance. On the 12th of November, French President Emmanuel Macron hosted an international conference at the Élysée Palace focussed on ensuring a democratic stabilisation of Libya ahead of the country’s 24th-of-December elections.

But what exactly happened in the ten-year interlude since 2011 for Libya’s democratic transition to be back to square one?

The Libyan Spring: A short-lived dream

If one knows anything about the Arab Spring(s), then one knows that it is a story of hope, quickly followed by bitter disillusionment (with Tunisia possibly being the only country to have followed a different path). Libya constitutes a textbook example of this broad narrative.

After Qaddafi’s death, Libyans were finally seeing the light at the other end of the tunnel. And they did indeed enjoy two years, give or take, of relative peace, during which the dream of democracy seemed within their reach. But the dream faded before they could grab it, and unfortunately, the harshness of reality soon caught up with them.

Following 2011, the Libyan state de facto was not one anymore, having lost its monopoly over the legitimate use of force within its boundaries. Numerous revolutionaries, still high on the euphoria of war, refused to give up their arms and began imposing their own rule, thereby fragilizing Libya’s territorial unity. This tendency was intensified as three of the country’s main cities began competing for political, and natural-resource control, with Benghazi on one side, and Tripoli and Misrata on the other. As an East-West line of division cut through Libya, various

islamist groupings, profiting from the infighting, made their way through unprotected areas. Violence and terror gradually pervaded the entire country.

This is when one of the key players in the present-day conflict-resolution process, Khalifa Haftar, made his appearance, presenting himself as the only actor capable of restoring Libya’s unity. Haftar used to be a general under Qaddafi’s regime, before he became a CIA asset tasked with overthrowing Qaddafi. After failing to do so, he went into exile into the US.

By 2014, as political Islam was continuing its progression through divided Libya, Haftar returned there and impressively managed to fuse various militias into one organisation – the Libyan National Army (LNA) – placing it under his own command and setting it out to fight islamist terrorism. He also wanted to extend the LNA’s control – initially circumscribed to the East of Libya, Benghazi included – to the whole of Libya, and therefore to re-build the Libyan state. But complete unification stopped short of succeeding, as Benghazi’s rival cities, Tripoli and Misrata, refused to side with Haftar, seeing in him a dictator in disguise. This refusal entrenched the East-West divide and marked the beginning of a full-blown civil war. Libya descended into chaos, and the Libyan people’s dream of democracy slid further away into oblivion, becoming barely discernible in the storm of gunshots and artillery charges.

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A Libyan, yet not-so-Libyan conflict

In April 2019, after years of war with no significant shift in the power balance between East and West, Haftar’s LNA launched a lightning attack on the West and gained control over 85% of Libya’s territory in a matter of days, reaching the outskirts of Tripoli, siege of the provisional, UN-backed Government of National Accord (GNA). The LNA’s military feat raised questions about Haftar’s potential foreign allies.

It was discovered soon thereafter that the LNA was being backed by Russian soldiers from the Wagner Group, a private, mercenary-supplying company. On the 11th of January 2020, during a joint press conference with Angela Merkel in Moscow, Vladimir Putin told a journalist that the mercenaries working for the Wagner Group “do not represent the Russian state”. The Wagner Group is indeed, at least nominally, a non- state affiliated military organisation. However, it is suspected by many that its clear aim is to serve Russian exterior interests while releasing the Kremlin from having to officially answer for some of its controversial operations.

The presence of Wagner’s Kremlin-backed soldiers is but the tip of the iceberg when it comes to foreign involvement in Libya. Upon digging deeper, one stumbles upon a complex nexus of more or less direct intervention by other powers, supporting either the Tripoli government or Haftar’s LNA – and sometimes both, contingent upon their evolving interests.

Haftar’s main supporters are Russia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Egypt (Joffé, 2020). As already mentioned, Russia has been supplying the LNA with manpower and arms through the Wagner Group, and Russia’s involvement in the Libyan conflict follows her continued influence-building efforts in the Southern Mediterranean since becoming a key player in the war in Syria. Russia’s aim is simply to curtail the West’s historic influence in the region and to further establish itself as a great power. The UAE and Egypt, on the other hand, mainly support Haftar for his fight against islamist terrorism, as opposed to the Tripoli government, known for its tolerance of “moderate” islamists. Both countries have been supplying arms to the LNA – especially Egypt through its Western border with Libya –, and there even is evidence that the UAE has been deceiving Sudanese citizens by recruiting them to work as security officers and subsequently forcibly sending them off to the Libyan battlefront as mercenaries.

What is more, France, whilst it formally recognises the Tripoli government, is suspected of simultaneously supporting Haftar, as suggested by the discovery of French missiles in the LNA’s arsenals. It is difficult to determine to what extent these suspicions are valid. But it nevertheless remains that Haftar’s fight against terrorism provides rear securitisation to the French forces fighting in the Sahelian strip, hence providing grounds for France’s two-faced policy.

The GNA in Tripoli, on the other hand, receives active support from Turkey, besides being officially recognised by the UN. In November 2019 (a few months after the LNA’s attack against Western Libya), the GNA signed a co-operation agreement with Turkey – despite not being vested with the legal legitimacy to do so, given its provisional natu-

re. The agreement promised to supply the GNA with both advanced arms technology and manpower, primarily drawn from Syrian mercenary troops. At the beginning of 2020, an estimated 6,000 Syrian mercenaries were operating on the Libyan battlefront under the GNA’s banner. In exchange for its help, Turkey was granted gas-extraction rights along the Libyan coastline. But beyond that economic interest, Turkey’s involvement in the conflict is mostly part of Erdogan’s wider neo-Ottoman foreign policy aimed at establishing Turkey as the main power in the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean.

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As has been made clear, therefore, the Libyan conflict has been totally “captured” by various foreign powers advancing their own regional interests, to the extent that labelling it primarily as a “civil war” barely seems appropriate.

Most striking, perhaps, about the foreign meddling in Libya is that the quasi-free

movement of arms and soldiers has been happening in spite of the UN Security Council

Resolutions n° 1970 and 1973 of 2011, which placed Libya under an arms embargo in

order to protect civilians. The ability of the UN to enforce the embargo naturally relies

in great part on the member states’ willingness to co-operate logistically and

intelligence-wise. Only, the key players in the region do not have that willingness; their

interests stand in the way. Charles de Gaulle’s cynical description of the UN as “the

thing” never appeared more apt...

What the future holds

After Turkey officially sided with the GNA in November 2019, Haftar’s troops started

retreating, thereby levelling the playing field again. On the 23rd of October 2020, a

ceasefire agreement was reached between the two sides. A transitional government of

national union was then formally agreed upon on the 10th of March 2021, with

Mohamed al-Menfi as head of state and Abdul Hemid Dbeibah as Prime Minister.

Considering Libya’s trip in hell, the progress that has been made towards peace and

stabilisation since the ceasefire was reached is nothing but impressive.

Is it realistic, therefore, to expect Libya to resume its journey towards democracy where

it left it off years ago? And if so, are there guarantees that democracy will not be

derailed once again?

The peace agreement is fragile, and a democratic transition is consequently as of yet

impossible to predict with certainty. Granted, a date has been set for the presidential

elections – the 24th of December. But the country remains riddled with internal

tensions.

For one, the future constitution, meant to be drafted and adopted following the

elections, proves a highly contentious issue. The East wants a strong president with a

weaker legislature, whilst the West wants the opposite.

Furthermore, the candidates for the presidency are a source of tension too. Amongst them are two very controversial figures: Khalifa Haftar himself, who announced his candidacy in a televised address on the 16th of November from Benghazi; and Saif al- Islam Qaddafi, Muammar Qaddafi’s son, who announced his intention of running on the 14th . The former has been at the epicentre of the Libyan conflict, and it is therefore unsure whether, were he to win the elections, the results would be accepted by all Libyans. The latter, on the other hand, is accused of direct involvement in the state repression of the 2011 protests against his father’s regime, and therefore his candidacy has already been rejected by the High National Electoral Commission (HNEC), charged with organising the elections.

If the internal situation were not complex enough as it is, the continued meddling of foreign powers complicates the picture even further. Whilst the formal declaration by the states and other organisations present at the Paris International Conference on Libya nominally supports the establishment of democracy, along with the total retreat of foreign forces from Libyan soil, there is nevertheless strong reason to suspect that the declaration is but nominal. Indeed, the declaration contains an asterisk pointing to Turkey’s “reservations” as to the retreat of foreign forces. In diplomatic terms, this is tantamount to an explicit admission that Turkey has no immediate intention of leaving Libya. Russian mercenaries were still present, too, when the declaration was being drafted. And one must be wary of taking the other states’ commitments at face value.

It would therefore be an understatement to say that many factors augur a bumpy road towards the establishment of democracy in Libya. That is not to say that democracy there is inevitably doomed – no one possesses the foresight to claim that with certainty. But several obstacles stand in its way, namely deep internal divisions, and the crude reality of geopolitical interests. In the Libyan case, dreams and reality definitively prove difficult to reconcile.