The Case of Libya
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Any political benefits that might have accrued for the US and UK from their withdrawal from Iraq were offset by the intensifying military operations in Afghanistan. Belated recognition that the campaign was failing to meet any of its political or military objectives led to the plan to transition to Afghan control by 2014. Yet within months of this decision, NATO found itself embroiled in yet another civil conflict, in Libya in March 2011. The resulting seven-month conflict reopened old divisions in the international community about the applicability and deployment of the use of force. It also raised troubling questions about the legal interpretation of Security Council mandates, and about the motivations guiding western policy-makers and their local and regional allies in bringing about regime change in Libya. Libyans in its second city Benghazi rose up against the 42-year regime of Colonel Gaddafi on 15 February 2011. Their uprising spread rapidly across Libya but met fierce and determined resistance by government security forces. International condemnation of the attempts to put down the rebellion mounted rapidly as Gaddafi reverted to the international pariah he had been prior to renouncing his weapons of mass destruction in 2003. In mid-March, reports that the regime was on the point of retaking Benghazi led to urgent calls by sections of the international community – led by France, the UK and Qatar - for intervention to forestall a feared retributive massacre of its civilian population. On 17 March, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1973 demanding an immediate ceasefire and authorising the international community to establish a no-fly zone to protect Libyan civilians from the regime.43 Resolution 1973 passed with five abstentions in the Security Council. Five regional powers and emerging economies all abstained – Germany, Brazil, India and permanent representatives Russia and China. This reflected deep misgivings at the haste with which advocates of the resolution were making the case for intervention on the basis of unproven and unclear allegations. Nor were they alone, as the internationally respected International Crisis Group (ICG) noted in a report in June that, “Much remains to come to light about the way in which the anti-Qaddafi rising began…much Western media coverage has from the outset presented a very one-sided view of the logic of events, portraying the resistance movement as entirely peaceful and repeatedly suggesting that the regime’s security forces were unaccountably massacring unarmed demonstrators…”44 On numerous occasions the international media whipped itself into a frenzy about the supposed atrocities being committed by the regime. However, evidence for their having taken place is proving rather harder to substantiate in many cases. The ICG’s North Africa Project director Hugh Roberts spent months investigating a story on Al Jazeera on 21 February (quickly picked up by news outlets around the world) that the Gaddafi regime was using its air force against peaceful demonstrators in Tripoli and elsewhere. After finding no documentary evidence or eyewitness accounts to corroborate it, he concluded that, “The story was untrue, just as the story that went round the world in August 1990 that Iraqi troops were slaughtering Kuwaiti babies by turning off their incubators was untrue and the claims in the sexed-up dossier on Saddam’s WMD were untrue.”45 Similarly, Amnesty International failed to find evidence for claims of mass rape and other human rights violations allegedly conducted by the regime, contradicting both US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno-Ocampo.46 The Libyan intervention is unsettling in other ways. The initial UN mandate for a No-Fly Zone with its limited justification for the use of force to protect the civilian population in Benghazi was far exceeded by NATO. Richard Falk, the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights, wrote recently that the limited mandate from the UN was disregarded almost from the outset, and that, “NATO forces were obviously far less committed to their supposed protective role than to ensuring that the balance of forces within Libya would be tipped in the direction of the insurrectionary challenge.” He makes the important points that Russia and China would almost certainly not have merely abstained had the true intent of NATO objectives been disclosed at the time of the Security Council vote, and that it is “extremely disturbing that a restricted UN mandate to use force should be totally ignored and then no action taken by the Security Council” to censure NATO “for unilaterally expanding the scope and nature of its military role.”47 Professor Li Weijian, Director of the Department of West Asian and African Studies at Shanghai Institute for International Studies, alluded to the problematic nature of the intervention in an interview with the leading Arab political magazine Al Majalla. An expert on China’s relationship with the Middle East, he criticized “the unparalleled degree of chaos and destruction which is mainly due to the fact that transition of power from the Qadhafi regime to the NTC was not natural. It was rather achieved by outside intervention and the use of force and thus today’s instability throughout Libya as well as the inhumane treatment of the Libyan dictator should not be surprising to observers.”48 These comments tap into deeper Chinese apprehension about ‘western norms’ supposedly driving concepts such as humanitarian interventionism, and such as the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ initiative. An article written on Chinese perspectives on global governance back in 2008 contains a phrase that eerily summarises (and anticipates) China’s scepticism about the potential misuse of such actions: “interventions must be authorised by the Security Council and must not be unilaterally hijacked by great powers, notably the US.”49
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The practical consequences may be far-reaching if concepts such as Responsibility to Protect become discredited or associated with militaristic western-centric approaches. Events in Libya have, to a certain extent, crystallised and confirmed many of the concerns expressed by non-western policy-makers about these supposedly ‘universal’ norms. The impunity with which certain NATO members stretched, manipulated and ignored the UN mandate in Libya certainly makes it more difficult to organise international consensus for humanitarian missions in the future. Qatar’s high-profile role in rallying Arab support must now be reassessed as its involvement in arming and funding a plethora of militia groups in the country becomes murkily apparent. Already these sub-state (and unregulated) networks are undermining the National Transitional Council, prompting its oil and finance minister to state that, “It's time we publicly declare that anyone who wants to come to our house has to knock on our front door first.”50Nor is Libya to date much safer than under the stifling dictatorial rule of Colonel Gaddafi. Western military intervention has once again turned a dysfunctional and repressive autocracy into a violent polity teetering on the brink of a failed state. The civil conflict built upon and magnified existing territorial and tribal tensions and created potent new flashpoints. These include flashpoints between groups that deserted the regime early on in the uprising and others that only did so once the outcome of the struggle became clearer, between opposition figures who fought in Libya and others in the diaspora who have since returned to Libya, and between territorially-based groups of fighters, notably competing (and clashing) groups of fighters in Benghazi, Misrata and the Nafusa Mountains. In addition, revenge attacks on groups and individuals seen as having supported the Gaddafi regime have escalated and, in some previously-loyalist areas such as Sirte, new militias have unleashed a “reign of terror” against them. A report drawn up by Ban Ki-Moon for the Security Council and leaked to The Independent reportedly claimed that more than 7000 new “enemies of the state” had been arbitrarily detained by rebel groups across Libya, with many being tortured in private jails outside the control of the new government.51 More than 300 militias currently operate in Libya, and the country is awash with weaponry, much of it taken from unregulated arms dumps. To this is added a fractious and unresolved political situation and lack of national consensus on crucial issues such as the formation of a national army or reintegration of former regime supporters.52 Tensions between the militias and the easy availability of guns means that disputes are far more likely to be resolved through force, creating further bad blood and grievance. A gun battle between two competing militias on a highway near Tripoli over the weekend of 11-12 November killed up to fifteen people and may be a harbinger of things to come.53 The arrest of Saif al-Islam Gaddafi on 19 November also reveals the uncertainties of power in Libya: whether the group that holds him will hand him over to a newly-forming Libyan government, and under what conditions, is far from clear. Parallels with the lethal and overlapping low-intensity urban conflicts in Iraq for access to and control over localised resources and the spoils of power are becoming more apparent by the week. |
Copyright, Blaise APLOGAN, 2010,© Bienvenu sur Babilown
Toute republication de cet article doit en mentionner et l’origine et l’auteur sous peine d’infraction
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