Libya, after the dictators fall
The country
has fallen prey to a war of gangs that is killing people, draining the treasury and multiplying
trafficking. In this geopolitical void, Italy and the UN are counting
on local
communities
Mattia Toaldo
More than two years have passed since the bloody Ramadan of 2014, when Libya quickly slipped into the civil war that is still ongoing. Diplomats and experts are commenting almost with relief that it is not yet as bloody as Syria. This is true, although few tragedies can be compared to what has been happening in the Levant for the past four years. Libya, however, is much closer to us, and not only in geographical terms. What happens there directly affects our geopolitics due to the migratory flow, which at least for one third involves refugees fleeing Syria. But Libya also concerns us for three other reasons. The first is because it is increasingly becoming a base for terrorist organisations, such as Islamic State (IS), which directly threaten Italy; secondly because it has always played a significant role in our energy requirement and thirdly because it is perhaps one of the very few countries in the world for which, at least in the West, Italy is expected to do something important considering the historical, economic and political relations. Libya is one of the few scenarios regards to which everyone, even the French, are asking, And what does Italy intend to do? Before analysing in depth what Italy can (and above all cannot) do, one must look carefully at the situation in the country. This conflict has exacerbated Libyas division into a myriad of local realities.
However, the real impact can be described following the borders of the three old Ottoman provinces; Tripolitania to the west, Cyrenaica to the east and the Fezzan to the south. Tripolitania saw harsh fighting last summer in the capital Tripoli as well as over the winter in the area separating the citys hinterland from the Jabal al-Nafusa mountains. At the moment, a significant number of ceasefires are in force. Cyrenaica, instead, is seriously affected by the war. Those who have visited Benghazi describe it partly as an Aleppo on the shores of the Mediterranean; a ghost city where entire districts have been destroyed and fallen prey to clashes between militias that are increasingly disconnected one from the other. To the number of dead reported (the website Libyabodycount reports 308 in Benghazi since the beginning of the year) one must add those missing who nobody counts. Very often their misfortune begins on those same social networks that many considered a means of liberation in 2011; their names appear on Facebook and to the various armed groups this is effectively an order to ensure they vanish. Further east of Benghazi there is Derna, always a magnet for and producer of jihadists. Targeted by IS last summer, for much of the Western media it incorrectly became the IS capital in Libya, only for them to discover that IS never really controlled the city and, although the local population suffered greatly, IS was thrown out in mid-June 2015. Between Tripolitania and Cyrenaica there is a border around the city of Sirte that has never been drawn; some place it to the west and some to the east of the inhabited area.
This is not an irrelevant issue because this is the countrys so-called half-moon oil reservoir, home to the most important oil facilities. It is in this area, which stretches all the way to Adabiya that some of the fiercest clashes have taken place since the spring of 2014. It is here that nowadays, Islamic State has put down its deepest roots, controlling a number of Sirtes most important areas as well as a number of towns along the coastal road. It is precisely from the intersection of this road and the one from the coast to the south that IS could divide the country in two, even more than it already is.
Finally there is the southern part of Libya, where in truth fighting has never stopped since 2011. While in coastal areas the conflict consists of an overlapping of local and regional dynamics, in the Fezzan there are the consequences of the breakdown of the precarious balance established under Gadhafi who, like all good dictators, did not keep the country united but divided it as much as possible so that all the various bits and pieces appeared even more dependent on him for their survival. A first rift that the Colonel used to his best advantage was the one between the Arab tribes and minorities. In Libya the largest are the Amazigh (also known as the Berbers), the Tuareg and the Toubou. Clashes between these last two minorities was the second element in Gadhafis strategy. Finally, there was the criminal element; the economies of these border communities was based on illegal trafficking involving goods generously subsidised by the government, starting with petrol. In exchange for a benevolent attitude to this trafficking, the regime and its hierarchs obtained political loyalty and kickbacks.
With the fall of Gadhafi these cleverly manipulated balances collapsed and today the fighting between these groups is as bloody as it is unknown to the media and to other international observers. In addition to the victims of conflict, in the course of this year Libya has lost a significant part of its assets. A crucial amount of infrastructure has been destroyed, including Tripolis international airport, attacked and then set on fire by Libya Dawn militiamen last summer. Oil production is now one third of what it was in 2010 due to fighting and to wells, pipelines and ports blocked by various armed groups.
In view of the situation, one should almost be surprised that the country is still producing between 400,000 and 500,000 barrels a day and that most of this is produced by the Italian company Eni, now the only foreign oil company operating in Libya. The conflict has also destroyed what little of the state existed, all this with a number of paradoxes. Eighty percent of the Libyan labour force continues to receive wages from the government or from government-owned companies and agencies. Already low under Gadhafi, work attendance is now complicated by the countrys institutional crisis, due to which many working in ministries do not even know who they are accountable to. The treasury too is empty because, with the simultaneous fall in oil production, there is effectively no revenue (in Libya there is effectively no income tax). And so, of the Central Banks over $100 billion of currency reserves at the beginning of 2014, over a quarter was frittered away and, unless something changes, another $26 billion will be spent this year only to pay state employees salaries and to buy some goods. According to European Union experts, at this rate Libya will experience a serious financial crisis in mid-2016.
Finally, the country no longer has any neutral institutions. Apart from the Central Bank and the national oil company, all the rest has been swallowed up by the conflict, starting with the armed forces and the judiciary. In the east there is no longer one single court open, while there are many prisons where torture is commonplace. A Human Rights Watch report on this subject enraged the internationally recognised government.
2. Since last summer Libya has experienced a serious institutional crisis, both the result of conflict and its propelling force. The June 25th 2014 elections, although supported energetically and with an open wallet by Europe, turned out to be a failure with an extremely low turnout (about a fifth of the adult population) and with a decisive increase in violence immediately after the elections. The House of Representatives elected on this occasion, was already missing MPs representing a number of minorities and the areas where fighting raged. After these elections the situation became even worse, so much so that today, in the most crowded assemblies, there are 75 MPs present out of 200. Due to the intensification of clashes in Tripoli, one group of MPs close to the rebel General Khalifa Haftar (al-Sisis local imitator, convinced Islamists could be eliminated with one blow of the sword) decided to move to the town of Tobruk, close to the Egyptian border and almost one thousand kilometres from the capital where ministries and foreign embassies remained and were eventually closed.
The government led by Abdullah al-Thani, elected by the House of Representatives, also fled to the east to the town of al-Bayia. By a strange quirk of fate, the seat of parliament and that of the government were separated by Derna, chosen at the time by Islamic State. The Tobruk/al-Bayia government has increasingly become the representative of Operation Dignity launched by Haftar against all Islamists. Supported by international recognition since it was the outcome of elections, this government has always been openly supported by the United Arab Emirates and by the al-Sisi regime, with which it shares plans to eradicate Islamists, but not an attachment to electoral legitimacy. Nowadays, many of the official Libyan government ministers are actually working from Cairo, answering journalists using Egyptian mobile phones and holding press conferences to reject proposals of an agreement while remaining in the Egyptian capital.
Heartland
