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(This article cites Dirk Vandewalle, a highly respected Libya scholar.)
NY Times, July 28 2014
Still Torn by Factional Fighting, Post-Revolt Libya Is Coming Undone
By KAREEM FAHIM
CAIRO — For weeks, rival Libyan militias had been pounding one another’s
positions with artillery, mortar rounds and rockets in a desperate fight
to control the international airport in the capital, Tripoli. Then
suddenly, early Saturday morning, the fighting just stopped.
The pause came as United States military warplanes circled overhead,
providing air cover for a predawn evacuation of the American Embassy’s
staff. Apparently fearing the planes, the militias held their fire just
long enough for the ambassador and her staff to reach the Tunisian
border — a reminder to Libyans of how even their most powerful allies
were incapable of putting out their incendiary feuds.
American officials said the evacuation was a temporary measure after
fighting drew too close to the embassy. But, coming so soon after the
withdrawal of other diplomatic missions, including the United Nations,
the moment appeared to signal a defeat — for Libyans who had convinced
themselves that the country would band together to save the revolution,
and for the country’s Western allies, who sometimes acted as if Libya’s
stability would take care of itself.
“No one in Libya can win,” said Mahmoud Okok, 33, a civil engineer who
lived near the airport and the United States Embassy, and who abandoned
his apartment because of the shelling. A cousin who also lived near the
airport was killed when a rocket landed on his home. Now Mr. Okok was
moving, with his wife and young son, overseas.
“Enough is enough,” he said. “I have lost hope in Libyans.”
Three years ago, the United States and its NATO allies used air power to
propel the Libyan rebels to a sweeping victory over Col. Muammar
el-Qaddafi, bombing government troops so that rebels could advance on
cities, and even the colonel himself, when he tried to flee.
But after the revolt, as Libya’s government struggled and violence
spread, the Obama administration and its allies failed in their efforts
to help Libyans achieve either democracy or security. Now, with
diplomats escaping and neighborhoods becoming battlefields, Libyans have
been left to wonder whether there is anyone left to broker the endless
fights.
The country is coming undone. Relentless factional fighting in Tripoli
and in the eastern city of Benghazi has left dozens of people dead.
Well-known political activists have been killed, diplomats have been
kidnapped, and ordinary citizens fear bandits on the roads.
Water and electricity shutdowns have become more frequent than at any
time since the chaos after Colonel Qaddafi’s fall, and fuel has
disappeared from Tripoli’s gas stations. On Sunday, several Western
nations advised their citizens to leave immediately. Gunmen attacked a
convoy of British diplomats.
Like Mr. Okok, many are leaving, mostly over land: The battle for the
airport has left it a gutted symbol of a disintegrating state. Lost in
the rubble of the airport was the sense of collective purpose that
seemed to unite Libyans not so long ago, during the revolt.
“If you’re willing to destroy your airport — that idea of national
sovereignty, that we’re all in this together, then the issue of national
identity is simply not as important as everyone thought it would be,”
said Dirk Vandewalle, an associate professor at Dartmouth College and an
expert on Libya who has visited regularly since the revolution.
Everyone seems stunned at the ferocity of the country’s arguments:
divisions of ideology and identity that mask deeper struggles, over
authority and wealth. Violence that was once sporadic now seems
impossible to stop. Libya’s fighters, evenly matched with apparently
limitless supplies of weapons and ammunition, appear unlikely to stand
down on their own.
This time, the fighting in Tripoli seems at least partly fueled by the
campaign of a general named Khalifa Hifter, who vowed in May to rid the
country of Islamist militias. He and his self-proclaimed national army
have focused their fight in Benghazi, where daily battles with the
militias have settled into a deadly stalemate.
Mr. Hifter has won support from Libyans who fear the growing
assertiveness of extremists, especially in eastern Libya. But his
campaign has also stirred new divisions, and violence, across the
country. Militias from the coastal city of Misurata that oppose Mr.
Hifter have been clashing for weeks around the Tripoli airport with
fighters from the mountain city of Zintan, who support him.
And the United States has sent mixed signals about Mr. Hifter’s efforts,
warning about the violence while conceding that he was pursuing
militiamen it considered terrorists.
After the 2011 revolution, Libya’s foreign allies had “a very light
footprint” as the transition got underway, said Claudia Gazzini, a Libya
researcher with the nonprofit International Crisis Group. The country
seemed to be holding together better than many people had expected.
“There was a consensus that this was a Libyan-led transition” — as well
as a general feeling that a turbulent transition would be smoothed out
by elections.
“There was some naïveté in that approach,” Ms. Gazzini said.
Colonel Qaddafi’s dictatorship had left a country bereft of
institutions, or consensus political figures, that might ease the
transition. The NATO intervention left its own troubling legacy,
stirring fights over resources provided by foreign patrons. Libyans
seemed focused on creating the institutions that “the West was
interested in seeing them create,” said Professor Vandewalle, including
elections and a political system. “It was hollow,” he said.
In the absence of a strong government, a monstrous shadow state was
emerging, centered on the power of militias made up of men who fought
Colonel Qaddafi and never put down their arms.
They became security units, paid by the government and aligned with
political factions or local tribal interests. “There were parallel
chains of command,” Ms. Gazzini said. “Parallel security units became a
problem from Day 1. Maybe the international community didn’t see the
consequences of this.”
And even if Libya’s foreign allies had wanted to push harder to
reorganize the security apparatus, they had little leverage, Ms. Gazzini
said. Libya, an oil-rich state, did not need money or other financial
incentives that had worked in other post-conflict countries, she said.
There were tragic distractions. In September 2012, militants attacked
the United States diplomatic mission in Benghazi, killing the
ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens, and three other Americans. As a
political controversy over the attack churned in Washington, the Obama
administration’s focus shifted to the safety of its diplomats and to
finding the ambassador’s killers.
Outwardly, American engagement with Libya was restricted after that to
carefully planned forays by heavily armed convoys, coming and going from
an embassy compound that resembled a fortress. American officials
remained active, including with efforts to train an army as well as to
strengthen civil society institutions, said Frederic Wehrey, a Libya
expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. At the same
time, “a very guarded force protection posture hindered access,” he said.
The failures of Libya’s politicians also left a vacuum. A quarreling
Parliament became a lightning rod for ideological fights between
Islamists and non-Islamists. Militia leaders extended their control,
including one who blockaded Libya’s main oil ports.
Libyan mediators and a group of high-level envoys, including from the
United States and Britain, have been unable to stop the fighting in
Libya’s two largest cities. Two weeks ago, the United Nations withdrew
from the country — promising, as the Americans have, that the move was
only temporary.
“The battles are taking place much more openly than they were,”
Professor Vandewalle said. “This is a threshold moment in Libyan
politics. What we’re seeing more than ever before is a struggle over the
soul of Libya.”
There are reasons to hope that the country will pull itself back from
the brink. For all its violence, it has not descended into the kind of
bloodletting seen in Iraq and Syria. A new Parliament that is supposed
to be seated soon also could unite the country.
Some, though, have given up, blaming Libya’s militiamen for the
country’s troubles, but also saying foreign allies failed to pay close
enough attention.
“They knew all this would happen and could be avoided,” said Salma
el-Bargathi, 28, who lives in Benghazi and is leaving the country over
worries about extremists. “They knew that Libya couldn’t do anything
without them.”
Suliman Ali Zway contributed reporting from Benghazi, Libya; Osama
al-Fitory from Tripoli, Libya; and David D. Kirkpatrick from New York.
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