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New Arab Coalition Coming Together To Intervene In Libya

New Arab Coalition Coming Together To Intervene In Libya

By Tom Hussain,McClatchy Foreign Staff (TNS)

ISLAMABAD — Three years after the toppling of Moammar Gadhafi, the military chiefs of seven Arab countries are expected to meet in Cairo next week to discuss whether they should intervene in Libya, which is split between two governments, controlled by rival militias, and home now to a blossoming Islamic State affiliate.

Analysts of Middle Eastern affairs said the meeting is likely to increase outside support for Khalifa Hifter, a former Gadhafi general who defected to the United States in the late 1980s and returned to Libya during the 2011 uprising that ended in Gadhafi’s death.

Hifter, who had expected to lead the creation of a new Libyan army after Gadhafi’s fall but was sidelined by the country’s political rivalries, launched an assault last year on what he said were radical Islamist groups that had taken control of much of Libya in the past three years. Libya is now divided between two main factions, one known as Operation Dignity, which is allied with Hifter and based in Tobruk, near the Egyptian border, and another called Libya Dawn, which is based in Tripoli and is backed by several militia factions.

The civil war anarchy has left room for the Islamic State to organize. It now controls Gadhafi’s hometown of Sirte. In January, it posted a video of what it said were 21 Egyptian workers being beheaded on a Libyan beach.

Ayham Kamel, director for the Middle East and North Africa for the Eurasia Group, a New York-based political risk advisory firm, said he doubted that the seven countries meeting May 18 in Cairo will agree to send troops to Libya. But increased military support for Hifter’s forces could provide an important edge in what has been the long-running stalemate between the Tobruk government, which the United States and the European Union recognize, and the Tripoli one, which has won a ruling in favor of its legitimacy from the country’s supreme court.

Kamel said supporting Hifter would be the easiest route for the Arab countries, rather than becoming involved in U.N.-sponsored peace talks that have made little progress in months of trying.

Next week’s gathering in Cairo was first reported by the U.S. publication Defense News, which said that participants include seven of the 10 Arab countries that have intervened in Yemen.

But the Libya meeting is a separate initiative pushed by Egypt, which borders Libya on the east. Saudi Arabia is the prime mover behind the Yemen campaign.
The countries sending representatives to Egypt include Jordan and Sudan and four members of the Gulf Cooperation Council — Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. All seven nations are members of the Saudi-led coalition currently opposing Houthi rebels in Yemen.

Notably, the gathering in Egypt excludes another Gulf Cooperation Council member, Qatar, which supports the Libyan Dawn administration in Tripoli.

Theodore Karasik, a Saudi-focused analyst based in the United Arab Emirates, called the Cairo meeting part of a “grand experiment in Arab-led coalitions” that “will illustrate how different theaters of the Middle East and North Africa are viewed in functional strategic and tactical direction.”

He noted that the one item of interest to analysts as the Yemen and Libya situations play out is “who is politically willing or excluded from operations.”

The May 18 meeting would follow up discussions last month by Arab League military chiefs in Cairo, which were attended by the Tobruk government’s armed forces chief of staff, Gen. Abdul Razzaq Nadhuri.

Since then, the UAE has delivered five Russian-built Mi-35 Hind helicopters. Additional Russian anti-tank and armor-piercing weapons and munitions will soon be delivered, Defense News reported.

Parallel to the military initiative, Egypt’s Foreign Ministry said last week it would host a forum in late May of Libyan tribal leaders supportive of the Tobruk-based government to “unify the Libyan people” and “to give a necessary boost toward political dialogue.”

(Hussain is a McClatchy special correspondent.) (c)2015 McClatchy Washington Bureau, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

AFP Photo/Abdullah Doma

After U.S. Helped Topple Gadhafi, Congress Showed Little Interest In Libya, Until Benghazi

After U.S. Helped Topple Gadhafi, Congress Showed Little Interest In Libya, Until Benghazi

By Nancy A. Youssef, McClatchy Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — It may be hard to believe now, but there was a time — 16 months ago to be exact — when Congress showed very little interest in Libya.

On Thursday, the House of Representatives voted along party lines, 232-186, to convene a select committee to investigate the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador, Christopher Stevens. Republicans said creation of the panel was necessary for Congress to carry out its oversight role into how the attack happened and whether the Obama administration purposely obscured facts afterward.

But the new Benghazi probe is unlikely to tackle another topic that some argue is just as critical to understanding what went wrong in Libya — Congress’ own failure to call attention to the deteriorating security situation in that country in the months after the NATO-assisted toppling of its longtime leader, Moammar Gadhafi.

Even after Congress approved the U.S. military joining a NATO mission in May 2011 whose efforts contributed Gadhafi’s fall and death, neither the House nor the Senate ever held a hearing about Libya and what the NATO-led effort had left behind. After four decades of living under Gadhafi, all with no real security force or order, Libya struggled to maintain security, its economy failed to recover and the weak government in Tripoli was powerless to fend off extremists who took control of the restive country.

Republicans were front and center in the failure to explore what was happening in Libya. Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the senior Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee and a harsh critic of the Obama administration over its handling of the Benghazi attacks, met with Stevens during a July 2012 visit to Libya, just two months before Stevens’ death. A month earlier, unknown attackers in Benghazi had attempted to assassinate the British ambassador to Libya.

Yet McCain made no mention publicly of the deteriorating security situation — the British had closed their consulate in Benghazi in response to the attack — and instead issued a news release that effusively praised the progress Libya was making toward democracy.

Asked this week about his visit with Stevens, McCain said that the ambassador had discussed the security situation with him. Pressed for details, McCain said he could not remember the specifics of the conversation. Asked whether he brought any security concerns to the attention of his fellow members of Congress or officials at the State Department when he returned from Libya, McCain said he could not recall. A review of Senate records found nothing to indicate that he had.

McCain acknowledged he didn’t probe. “I didn’t ask him questions,” he said. “It was part of the conversation. He said he relayed that information back to the State Department.”

McCain is not alone. Before the Benghazi attack, Congress showed little interest in developments in Libya after the collapse of the Gadhafi government, even though the civil war there was fueled in no small part by the U.S. decision to back NATO’s air campaign. The ramifications of that effort have had a far greater effect than many imagined when bombing began in Libya in March 2011.

Russia, which had joined the United States in supporting a U.N. resolution authorizing the use of force to protect civilians in Libya, later accused the West of exceeding the authority the U.N. had granted it when it helped topple Gadhafi. Moscow now cites the experience as one reason it has refused to be more cooperative on halting the violence in Syria.

The looting of the Gadhafi government’s weapons stores is believed by many to have fueled the rise of al-Qaida in northern Africa, where al-Qaida-inspired terrorists nearly seized the country of Mali before French forces drove them back into the desert early last year. Libyan weapons are said to have helped the growth of al-Qaida-linked groups in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. Benghazi’s airport now routinely receives passengers that officials there believe are bound for terrorist training camps set up in the countryside of eastern Libya.

Yet none of those developments have been the subject of congressional hearings in the more than 2 1/2 years since Gadhafi fell.

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AFP Photo

Libya Remains In The Grip Of Rival Rebel Factions

Libya Remains In The Grip Of Rival Rebel Factions

By Laura King, Los Angeles Times

TRIPOLI, Libya — Dragging deeply on a cigarette and swirling his espresso dregs, the curly-haired young militiaman offered up a vivid account of the battles he and fellow rebels waged to bring down dictator Moammar Gadhafi — days of blazing bombardment, thirsty desert nights.

Then he voiced his dismay at the chokehold those same armed groups now maintain on Libya.

“We fought so hard to make a new country,” said the 28-year-old of Libyan extraction who left Britain to join the revolution that swept this North African nation in 2011. “Now it’s all about money. Money and guns.”

The rebel groups that worked together to oust Gadhafi have fragmented into rival factions whose outsized collective power has sapped Libya’s oil wealth, turned a nascent government structure to tatters and ushered in a grim cycle of assassinations, abductions and firefights in the streets.

International attention tends to focus on the most audacious acts of militias, such as the abduction in October of the prime minister, the storming of various government ministries and last month’s bid to illicitly sell $36 million worth of oil. The tanker used by the militia was intercepted by U.S. Navy SEALs and handed over to the Libyan government.

But it is their cumulative daily actions that have cemented the grip of armed factions. With control of nearly all the country’s major military and industrial installations, observers say, the groups engage in arms smuggling on an epic scale, extort staggering protection payments from businesses and regularly engage in turf wars that send scrambling anyone unlucky enough to be in the vicinity when the shooting starts.

The main armed factions number in the dozens but splinter groups run to the hundreds, holding sway over economic, political and social life. Their encampments dot the capital. Weaponry is on brazen display in a central Tripoli marketplace. Behind one luxury hotel, truck-mounted antiaircraft guns line a vacant lot like taxi touts hustling for fares.

Some of the groups have been nominally integrated into the weak central government, their allegiance proffered in the manner of a gangland offer that can’t be refused. Drawing government pay but answering to their own commanders, the militias in effect control oil fields and hospitals, ports and prisons — and even Tripoli’s international airport, the main gateway to the outside world.

A powerful militia from Zintan recently commandeered a planeload of weapons intended for Libya’s military, a government official said, an account confirmed by several others with knowledge of the incident. The Zintanis, they said, brought trucks onto the tarmac of the Tripoli airport, offloaded the arms and drove away.

“They do whatever they please, and their guns speak for them,” said the middle-aged bureaucrat whose government job at the airport forces him to work alongside members of the militia from Zintan, a major town in Libya’s western mountains. “Whatever they want, they will get.”

Like several others interviewed, the official asked that his name not be published for safety reasons.

Although the militias claim they are securing the airport on behalf of the Interior Ministry, their ready access to the lucrative aviation-based smuggling trade invites challenges from rivals as well as stifling legitimate commercial activity.

International carriers, including British Airways and Lufthansa, suspended flights to Tripoli for several days last month after a bomb detonated overnight on one of the runways. It hasn’t been determined who was responsible.

Corruption, by all accounts, is a driving force in the everyday dealings of militias. An official with the Transport Ministry, whose position gave him decision-making authority on a major airport contract, told of being personally coerced by Zintan fighters’ threats into backing the bidder they favored.

Libya’s turmoil boils down to a struggle for control of resources, chief among them its vast oil wealth. The government has been engaged in tortuous negotiations with an eastern militia leader, Ibrahim Jathran, in an effort to regain access to key oil ports that his men have blockaded for nearly nine months.

On Monday, the state news agency reported that a deal had been struck, although transfer of the ports could take up to a month. Since then, more unrest has been reported around the ports. Jathran, whose action helped reduce Libya’s crude output to a trickle, has demanded greater regional autonomy and a far larger share of oil revenue.

Even if an accord proves durable, the dispute led to the country’s West-friendly prime minister, Ali Zidan, being sacked by lawmakers and fleeing the country for Europe.

The final straw came when Zidan ordered Libya’s military forces to prevent the North Korean-flagged tanker Morning Glory from departing a rebel-controlled port with its cargo of crude, a task they were unable or unwilling to carry out. That set the stage for the SEALs’ intervention, and laid bare the government’s powerlessness.

“Really, there is no army,” Zidan was quoted by the Reuters news agency as saying afterward from his newfound refuge in Germany. “I thought there was one, but then I realized there really isn’t.”

Western governments, including the United States, recognize the need to rebuild Libya’s barely functioning military and make it answerable to a central authority. The Obama administration plans to assist in the training of Libyan troops, but analysts say it would be a matter of years before army strength and capability can begin to rival that of battle-hardened militias.

Some of the former anti-Gadhafi fighters say they would be eager to join a government security force, except that the taint associated with police abuses under the now-dead dictator is too difficult to overcome. So for now they prefer their unofficial status.

“We can’t wear those uniforms,” said Mohammed Abdulsalam Jedeed, who leads a militia contingent that has taken control of the Tripoli Medical Center, one of the capital’s main hospitals. “The people would hate us.”

But many people already do, or at least accept their presence only as an element of some Faustian bargain. In the meantime, discontent simmers.

Heading toward the scorching summer, Tripoli is already paralyzed by rolling power blackouts. The country’s foreign reserves are steadily shrinking, drained by a bloated public payroll that remains a holdover from the Gadhafi era and unsustainable subsidies. Yet in a country awash in oil, periodic gasoline shortages leave motorists stuck in hours-long queues.

For young people like the former combatant from the gloomy English industrial city of Manchester, the lack of opportunity yawns like a chasm. He would like to leave militia life behind, he said, but he has been unable to find another job.

“No militia does anything for Libya anymore. Everyone is just looking for war booty,” he said, eyeing the currency traders a few feet from his cafe table, scurrying past with rollaway suitcases said to be stuffed with cash. “I want a normal life, I want to get married. But how?”

At the University of Tripoli, two female engineering students said that after the euphoria of Gadhafi’s fall, they now felt that safety was deteriorating daily. Both hoped their families would not deem it too dangerous for them to attend classes and continue their studies.

“Nothing can change for the better until the weapons are gone,” said Anwar Elsayeh, 19 and anxious-eyed. “But there is no one who has the power to make that happen.”

AFP Photo/Abdullah Doma

Leaked UN Document Details Plans For Post-Gadhafi Libya

As the rebels near the end of their months-long struggle for power and Gadhafi’s family flees to Algeria, the world is looking to Libya’s future.

The United Nations seems to already have a plan for Libya once Gadhafi is captured and officially deposed. According to a 10-page leaked document, which was apparently written by a special UN team led by former UK Amnesty International head Ian Martin, the UN is prepared to deploy military observers and police officers to Libya. As Al Jazeera reports,

The document outlines plans for UN-assisted elections in the next six to nine months.

It also calls for the deployment of 200 unarmed military observers and 190 UN police officers to serve as trainers.

But it says such a deployment would only be implemented if it was requested by Libyan authorities and authorised by the UN Security Council.

“If requested by the Libyans and authorised by the Council, the UN could contribute to confidence-building and to the implementation of agreed military tasks, through unarmed UN military observer (UNMOs).

“Such confidence-building might be necessary for the troops of the Gaddafi government which will find themselves under the control of hostile forces. The UNMOs might also act as some deterrence against ill treatment of the former enemy by rogue elements.”

Additionally, 61 civilian staff would be stationed in Libya for the first three months, and the UN will support an interim government.

The document creates the impression that the UN is more focused on the immediate aftermath of the Gadhafi government’s collapse, not long-term stabilization efforts. If major challenges arise during the transition of power, additional support would be “beyond the capacity of the UN.”

While it is not unusual for international groups to assist in transition periods after a violent revolution, the UN’s plans suggest that the Libyan rebels’ desire for complete autonomy might not be fully realized. The document’s insistence that actions will only be taken with the consent of the Libyan people is admirable, and one can only hope that the UN follows through on that commitment instead of exerting undue influence in the new phase of Libya’s history.