Libya’s chaos: not amenable to mediation

Libya seems finally to be about to descend into full blown civil war. Last week, the United Nations initiative to bring the country’s two rival governments together in order to begin to mediate a solution failed to materialise on the promised date of January 5.

Each, of course, has its own militia backing – Libyan Dignity for the Tobruk-based government and Libyan Dawn for the government still in Tripoli. Although the United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) denied that its initiative had failed, the distrust evinced by both sides (particularly

It is becoming increasingly likely that the only solution will be through the force of arms.

by Libyan Dawn) towards the UN’s Special Envoy, Bernardino Leon, makes it unlikely that they will overcome their distaste and agree to his mediation.

Quite apart from that, the increasingly uncompromising language of the two governments underlines how far apart they are, whilst the worsening military situation highlights how difficult any compromise leading to peace has become. Instead, airstrikes around Tripoli and Misurata in Western Libya are coupled with an ongoing battle to eliminate Islamists from Benghazi and a new struggle to control Libya’s oil ports that has cut oil exports from 1.6 million b/d to a paltry 128,000 b/d at the start of 2015.

Contested legitimacies

Although the government in Tobruk, led by Ali al-Thinni who was appointed by the House-of-Representatives (HoR), the new parliament elected on June 25, is internationally-recognised, its legitimacy is still contested by Omar al-Hassi’s rival administration in Tripoli instituted by the old General National Congress (GNC) which was supposed to have been replaced as a result of the June elections. It is as a result of a dispute over the handover of its powers to the new body – in which the GNC was supported last November by Libya’s Supreme Court – that the GNC still claims legislative and constitutional authority and regards the HoR as the usurper, in defiance of international opinion.

It also has the advantage of being in possession of most of the physical assets and institutions of government in Libya, such as the Supreme Court, simply because they are mainly in Tripoli. Luckily for the HoR, although the Libyan central bank is there, its funds are in large part dispersed abroad. There is, therefore, a procedural dispute over who runs it, with each government having appointed its own head and claiming authority. Oil revues – Libya’s sole source of foreign currency to pay for imports upon which the population is totally reliant – are paid into accounts abroad and thus largely come under the control of Tobruk because of the international recognition that the HoR enjoys.

Behind this formal dispute, of course, lies another, more cogent reality. The outcome of the June elections was very difficult for Libya’s Islamist parties to accept. They performed far worse than they had expected. They therefore seized upon an arcane procedural issue – the formal handover of power – to challenge the electoral outcome.

Beyond this, too, is yet another uncomfortable reality; namely a dispute over how those who were involved in the Qadhafi regime should be treated. In May 2013, the issue was ostensibly solved by a law, the Political Isolation Law, which banned all such people from holding public office for a period of at least ten years.

But that law too was based on still further unpleasant realities in that it was an act of revenge by those Libyans who had chosen exile or who had been persecuted by the Qadhafi regime, such as the Islamists, against those who made difficult compromises with it and remained in the country – the vast majority of Libyans.

The consequence of the law – which was coerced out of the GNC by threats of militia action – was, at a stroke, to deprive Libya of its bureaucrats and administrators, such as Mahmoud Jibril, the founder of Libya’s dominant secular nationalist party, the National Forces Alliance, as well as victimising prominent opponents of the Colonel’s regime, such as Muhammad al-Mugariaf, who had been ambassador to India before he created the National Salvation Front, the dominant anti-Qadhafi exile opposition from 1980 onwards. Now the HoR wants to repeal the law and the GNC wants to retain it.

Violent confrontations

Of course, if these disputes were merely verbal, reconciliation might be possible. They have an increasingly dominant violent dimension as well, however, and their respective militia coalitions are busy carving out areas of exclusive control. Libya Dignity, under the maverick General Khalifa Haftar – now adopted as potential army commander by the HoR – has almost completed the suppression of Islamist resistance in Benghazi and threatens to move to Derna next. The Islamist backed Libyan Dawn coalition, based in Misurata, retains control of Tripoli and holds its defeated rivals in Zintan and the Washafanna at bay.

Both coalitions have wider ambitions too. Libyan Dignity enjoys covert Egyptian and Emirati support which has allowed it to attack Misurata and Tripoli from the air, with the threat of intensified bombardment to come. Libyan Dawn, realising that the GNC may soon lose access to oil revenues, has launched a ferocious attack on the Ras Lanuf and es-Sidra oil ports, to wrest them from the HoR’s control.

It is increasingly difficult to see how the two sides could find common ground for a reconciliation and it is becoming increasingly likely that the only solution will be through the force of arms – although that might also provoke foreign intervention.