Anas El Gomati is the founder and director of the Libyan think tank, the Sadeq Institute. He discusses how so much of Libya’s history has been shaped by European colonial powers and other foreign states meddling in its affairs. On the flip side, E.U. developments and the rise of right-wing populism and racist anti-migrant sentiment cannot be disentangled from what transpires in Libya. In light of the ongoing fighting between rival government structures, how can the control of oil resources and state assets shift from elite strongmen to civilian bodies?

• Transcript

Hi, I’m Talia Baroncelli, and you’re watching theAnalysis.news. I’ll shortly be joined by Libyan analyst, Anas El Gomati, to speak about the situation in Libya as well as Libya’s role in the conflict in neighboring Sudan. If you enjoy this content, please consider donating to the show by going to theAnalysis.news and hitting the donate button at the top-right corner of the screen. You can also get on the mailing list so that you’re informed every time a new episode is published. Also, go to our YouTube channel, theAnalysis-news. Hit like on all the videos you want to watch and hit subscribe so that you’re notified every time a new episode drops. See you in a bit with Anas.

Joining me now is Anas El Gomati. He’s the founder and director of the Libyan think tank, the Sadeq Institute. Thank you so much for joining me, Anas.

Thanks, Talia. I appreciate it.

There’s so much I want to speak to you about today, but I think we should start off with what happened after the NATO intervention in Libya in 2011, where Muammar Gaddafi was ousted from power. He was killed, and fighting continued afterwards. There was a UN-led process which tried to establish elections and a functioning government. I think it’s safe to say that the process has unfortunately failed and that there are two rival governments now; one in the West and one in the East. What’s going on right now in Libya?

Well, it’s a really complicated story, and it’s always good to start from where you picked things up. It’s difficult to look back in retrospect and try to condense those ten years together. But I would say for the first three years, things were not as bad as they are now. There was an episode of violence that was fairly limited in comparison to the last two conflicts that Libya has endured—one in 2011, one in 2014, and one in 2019. But I don’t know whether or not Libyans would always consider what happened in 2011 to be a civil war. Of course, as you alluded to, NATO’s intervention was heavy on that. I think it also limited a lot of the potential violence that could have occurred, as we saw in Syria. I think that’s one thing that has to be said about the 2011 intervention.

In comparison, the 2014 and 2019 interventions contained the very same players and contained more players. I think that’s where the UN remitted and turned a blind eye to the maligned influence of a lot of regional players and world players that have continued to destabilize Libya. That’s been forgotten.

From 2011 to 2014, Libya was fairly stable, and its progress was actually quite positive in comparison to right now. So there were elections in 2012, with an 80% turnout, very high numbers for Libya’s first elections. There was so much pluralism in that first Parliament that Libya elected that it was a hung Parliament. There were so many different groups there because 60% of the seats were given to independent candidates not running on a party list. Forty percent were given to a party list.

I think, in retrospect, some of those things might now look like a mistake. Maybe what Libya needed at the time was strong party affiliations so that a block could come to dominate and say, “This is the direction that we’re going to take after the elections.” Many argued at the time that we didn’t really know what the Libyans wanted. We don’t know who the Libyans are, so let them elect as many Libyans as possible and let them move forward.

So in retrospect, the first couple of years were okay. Yes, there were militias that were on the ground at the time, but they were not conducting the violence that we’ve seen them conduct since 2014 and since 2019.

So for the first three years, up until Libya’s second elections in 2014, the situation was fairly stable on the ground, and there was one single government. It was elected by the Libyan people en masse. I think, in that sense, there was much to be celebrated. I think Libya’s economic outlook, its political outlook, and its stability in the region were good.

In 2014, we had a civil war, and it came down from the rise of this actor who many may know of and many may not know of, but his name is Khalifa Haftar. I think your viewer should know who he is. He has the longest-standing political career of anybody in the entire Middle East and North Africa. It spans 54 years. He emerged in 1969 with Muammar Gaddafi in a coup against King Idris. He has gone on to launch seven power grabs over a career now that spans, as I said, 54 years. Those power grabs are not just coups. They are defections from the very partners that he launched those coups with.

If we start looking at today’s recent news, the last 24 hours of what has happened in Libya, which we may get into in a little while, you’ll see Khalifa Haftar’s fingerprints and his political DNA all over that.

To set the scene, the first three years were not so bad. I think NATO’s biggest mistake was most likely abandoning Libya’s political future and the role of regional actors and not immunizing Libya from those two things. There was the creation of militias that needed to be integrated into a unified military and a subservient military, which Libya had never experienced. The reason why Libyans overwhelmingly overthrew the Gaddafi regime was that they wanted to live in a society, in a state that was not controlled by a family or by personal militias but by a neutral state security service that respects human rights and allows you to have the same level of freedom no matter where you’re from, what your surname is, what your tribe is, or what part of the country you’re from.

Since 2014, that has been quite the opposite. Khalifa Haftar emerged and declared himself the leader of the self-styled Libyan National Army, or the Libyan Arab Armed Forces. With that, he launched this coup and a war on terror that split the country in two. He split the country between two rival parliaments, the first Parliament that was elected in 2012, a second Parliament that was elected in 2014, and then two rival administrations that were unified temporarily after Libya’s last war in 2019 that Khalifa Haftar launched, but has since, as you’ve mentioned, slipped back to another partition after he failed to have elections in late 2021.

So it is a bit of Groundhog Day in Libya because there have been lots of changes in the middle of the last 12 years. At the same time, for so much change, it’s almost like old wine and new bottles. The same actors are still there from 2011, and they’re still here in 2023. Despite the unification process, the UN process that was supposed to unify all these different parts and put Humpty Dumpty back together again, you still have two different governments under different acronyms. You still have two rival military formations. You still have two rival parliaments.

Well, I would argue that the NATO intervention is what pushed Humpty Dumpty to fall off the wall, so to speak. Of course, Gaddafi was not liked by his people, or by some of them at least. Maybe some of them supported him, but a lot of people would argue that they were uprising against Gaddafi and they didn’t want him to be in power anymore. But the NATO intervention was not conducted in a way that would ensure that there would be something left of the country afterwards.

In 2011, you had so many people fleeing the country and refugees trying to escape Libya and get to Europe. A lot of people, unfortunately, died in the Mediterranean trying to make those crossings. So the intervention wasn’t benign. I’m sure the mandate was not conducted or not designed in such a way to ensure that there would be functioning institutions. We’re still seeing that there is a power vacuum. Now you have, as you said, Haftar, who has his own interests, and you have these rival governments.

Bringing it back to right now, you have a government in the West, the GNA [Government of National Accord], which is supported by the UN, but I think a lot of other European powers and by Turkey. Then in the East, you have a House of Representatives which has just suspended Fathi Bashagha. So what’s going on there? Why was he suspended? What was his vision, at least, of trying to unify Libya, or was he just trying to grab power and resources?

Can I just touch on your point? I actually agree with you. But just on your initial point about NATO.

Sure.

I think the question about NATO’s intervention, lack of planning, and the fact that members of NATO have since gone on to undermine Libya’s stability tells you a lot about the way that that organization functions. The reality is that why are these states, what we consider to be strong states, or thought were strong states, why are they so brittle? That’s really the reality. A lot of these states, the authoritarian states, the myth of the strong man, it comes down to Fathi Bashagha’s own personal story because that’s really the crux of this story with this parallel administration that was created. They’re brittle states. They look like they’re very strong, but the moment that you poke them, they start to disintegrate because there are no institutions. There is no plan for a day after, and they’re designed to be coup-proof. I think this is where a lot of these states, whether it be Saddam’s [Hussein] Iraq, whether it be Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, or whether it be Gaddafis Libya, or tomorrow, even Egypt’s [Abdel Fattah El-]Sisi, and as we’re looking at the fall of Saddam and its disintegration into a civil war, the rise of [Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo] Hemedti, these places, their institutions are so personalized. They’re so brittle that once there is any intervention from the outside or there is an uprising, they start to fall apart.

But let me come to this question about Fathi Bashagha because it’s a really interesting point that you’ve raised about what are his motivations. His own personal story is fascinating. What you have with the story of Fathi Bashagha is an individual who joined the revolution in 2011. He was a former Air Force pilot and led a revolutionary armed group, a militia from the city of Misrata, which became famous during the revolution for being a real kingmaker and power broker in Western Libya, where the capital is in Tripolitania. He went on to then join, over several years, the political class. He was elected as a member of Parliament in 2014; that second Parliament that we spoke about, the House of Representatives. Then he was appointed as the Minister of Interior to the Government of National Accord that was established in 2015 during the UN process to unify this first division after Libya’s first civil war in 2014. Four months into the job, Khalifa Haftar attacks the capital.

Now, we should remember that the GNA didn’t have a Ministry of Defense. It didn’t have a Chief of Staff. It didn’t have a Chief of Intelligence. So he was literally the last man standing in terms of Libya’s or Tripoli’s security. He goes on to defend the capital from Khalifa Haftar’s onslaught. What begins as just a normal war escalates into a nasty, brutal, personal war of words between Khalifa Haftar and Fathi Bashagha. Khalifa Haftar calls the GNA, the units, and the forces fighting underneath him that Bashagha was leading– he calls them terrorists; and says, “I will never enter into a dialogue with them.”

On the other hand, Fathi Bashagha calls Haftar a putschist, a coup plotter, a war criminal, someone whom he will never meet with. In fact, on the record, he says, “There will be no peace in Libya whilst Haftar enjoys a political role.”

Now, that was in 2019 and 2020. The civil war culminated in a stalemate around the summer of 2020. Within six months, there is a UN political process that says, “Well, there is a rival government here in the East. There’s a rival government here in the West. Let’s again unify these two separate halves.” They create a political dialogue forum where they bring in members of the status quo, Libya’s two rival parliaments, to appoint two figures, one president and one prime minister.

Fathi Bashagha enters into that race with the head of the Parliament in the East, who is considered to be Khalifa Haftar’s staunchest political ally. So people start scratching their heads, and they start wondering, what happened to all this anonymity?

Before the end of that year, before the end of 2021, Fathi Bashagha stood in Benghazi, the eastern city that has become infamous for the events in 2012, over the last ten years, and is the center of power of Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan National Army. He shares a handshake with the man that he said there would be no political future for in the country and that there would be no peace with. Khalifa Haftar, the man who said that he emerged in Libya not for his own personal political gain or financial gain but to fight the scourge of terrorism, which he has said he will never enter into a dialogue with and shakes his hand. So the terrorists are shaking the putschist’s hand.

It’s an unusual place in Libya, but it’s a place where there are friends with benefits, but there are also enemies with benefits. That’s what happened with this creation of the Government of National Stability. These two figures emerged, and they have this narrative that surrounds them. Everyone has called Khalifa Haftar, or many people have called him ‘the strong man of the East.’ Fathi Bashagha, after his role in the 2019 civil war, became labelled ‘the strong man of the West.’

What happens is that these two strong men come together and forge an agreement, but they’re not strong enough to take the capital. They tried to overthrow the Government of National Unity that was appointed in 2021 under Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh, the current sitting internationally recognized Prime Minister, and they failed to overthrow him. What happened beyond failing to overthrow him, it actually dispels a lot of the myths around the “Arab strongman.” They’re only as strong as their rhetoric suggests. In a place like Libya, where there are no angels on either side of these civil wars, I’ll be very clear about that, but there are militias that have emerged that fight for greed. There are certainly militias and armed groups out there that fight for grievance. There are those that are going to end up supporting the revolution, and there are going to be those that oppose it and support Gaddafi. The question is not who is right and who is wrong. The question is, what are they fighting for, and how do you get them to stop fighting? And so that deal that was cut between the two rival strongmen of the last civil war, the two political polls of the last civil war, failed. It failed because these two strongmen assumed that they could buy their way out of a civil war.

Civil wars are there. There’s a lot of political rhetoric that is there. There’s always going to be financial gain. There are going to be geopolitical and economic interests that are there. In a place like Libya which has some of the highest levels of gold deposits and the highest levels of cash deposits in the world, of course, there’s going to be greed, but there’s also going to be grievances. Trying to meddle and mould both together and mesh both together has been one of the reasons why we’re struggling to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. You can’t buy out everyone. You can’t buy out people that may have supported Gaddafi’s regime. They’re principled, and they believe in what they fought for.

In contrast, you might not be able to buy out those that fought against him and have now fought against Khalifa Haftar and have now fought against Fathi Bashagha. But as you can see, over a decade, one of the things that no one really looks at is how we turn away from these places for a decade, and we look back, and we say, “Oh, yeah, it’s Groundhog Day. It’s just two governments. It’s just two rivals. They’ll fix it eventually.” You forget that on a dusty Tuesday in a place like Libya, there are war crimes that are taking place on either side or any of the sides that we’ve just mentioned that have been there over the last decade. The build-up of those grievances makes those states even more brittle. It makes it even harder to then address the number of grievances that have been there for the last decade. So when you look at the rise and the fall and demise of a player like Fathi Bashagha, it tells you a couple of things– strong men beware, and those that are buying, beware of what you’re buying because, to be honest, that is a myth that has now come down crashing on the plate of analysts, diplomats, and commentators across the country and further afield. But also that the serious work that needs to go in, as you mentioned, the serious work and planning that needs to take place after the fact of an intervention like what happened in 2011 or two serious civil wars that have erupted in the aftermath, you can’t put them to bed through a handshake in Benghazi and assume there’s nothing else to see here, and everything will be rosy.

Well, yeah, why don’t we talk about that planning? Because you have this unlikely alliance, as you might call it, between Haftar and Bashagha. Are they in control of some of the oil reserves?

Mhm.

Or is it the UN-led or the UN-supported government in the West in Tripoli that’s controlling those reserves? Because the Libyan Coast Guard, for example, receives an incredible amount of money from the E.U. and especially from Italy to ensure that people on the move, that asylum seekers don’t leave Libya and that they don’t arrive in Italy or in other parts of the peripheral area of Southern Europe. So they’ve been systematically pushed back. This is, of course, against international standards and against international norms. It’s [inaudible 00:18:00]. It’s pushing them back to Libya. The Libyan Coast Guard has been fully complicit in these crimes, and they’re receiving money from the E.U. to basically do the E.U.’s dirty work and ensure that people don’t leave the country.

Mhm.

Who do these people represent? Are they from the West, so to speak, and are they also in control of some resources? The most important question would be, are the Libyans themselves, the Libyan population, are they benefiting from any of these resources and oil profits whatsoever, or are they just completely impoverished?

It’s a number of questions you asked, and all of them are pertinent and straight to the point. So I’ll try and be as quick as I can to go through them.

Number one, I think when it comes to the oil reserves and how they’re controlled, that is a really unusual game that reflects the ways in which wars are fought now in the 21st century and how different they were fought in the 20th century. Libya is littered with mercenaries and foreign mercenaries. There is Russias Wagner Group that operates in Libya. There are other sides and factions that have delivered their own mercenaries. Libya is littered with militias and tribes.

If you ask Khalifa Haftar when he blockaded that oil, he said, “It wasn’t me that blockaded it. It was the Libyan tribes.” But then he’ll put out an order through the Libyan National Army to say that nobody can work from the Libyan military in any of those facilities.

In late 2021, I believe, in September 2021, after Libya’s oil was blockaded at the end of the civil war in 2019 and 2020, that oil blockade was lifted through negotiations in Moscow. So there was an element there that was hinting at foreign control. It was blockaded again after Khalifa Haftar and Fathi Bashagha established their own GNS, the Government of National Stability, that parallel government we spoke about a few moments earlier. After they blockaded the oil, Khalifa Haftar negotiated with Dbeibeh, the Prime Minister in Tripoli, and again stabbed in the back his own political ally, Fathi Bashagha, and lifted the blockade through negotiations in the UAE between, as I said, Dbeibeh and Haftar. Now, Dbeibeh and Haftar each control portions of the oil wealth. None of the oil wealth goes to the Libyan people. They’re yet to see any of it.

Basically, look at the pictures across the country. There is nothing that has been built in that country arguably since the late ’70s. That’s one of the things that Libya is desperately in need of. If you go to Libyan government estimates, Libyan is in the region of $100 billion of investment in its infrastructure alone, and that’s telling. What it’s telling is that the $100 billion is there. It’s in the Libyan coffers. They could spend that money if they wanted to. So much of that money goes into the hands and pockets of Libya’s unelected and expired political elite.

When it comes to the Coast Guard, it’s a very different question. I think it’s really important. It is one of the things that the European Union is certainly guilty of. If you look at the UN panel of expert reports, not only are they training and equipping the Libyan Coast Guard in means that are deeply contrary to international humanitarian law, Libya’s own law, and Europe’s own responsibilities and maritime responsibilities, but more peculiar than that is that many of the individuals that are responsible for the smuggling of humans and human trafficking, they’re the ones that are now part of the Libyan Coast Guard.

In the West of Libya, you have individuals known as [inaudible 00:21:45] and other people like that. The town of Az-Zāwiyah is a critical departure point for refugees and migrants fleeing to Europe. By the UN’s own admission and its own panel of expert reports, there are individuals that were smugglers that attended training courses under the E.U. and were received by the E.U. themselves. They’ve either taken material support or support of some kind from the E.U.

What is getting worse now is that for the first time in the modern history of Libya, departures are exceeding in the East of the country where there has been a smuggling empire under Khalifa Haftar. Sixty percent of departures today, the 57,000 that landed on the shores of Italy over the last year, have come from Libya, at least 60% from Eastern Libya. Khalifa Haftar today has moved from being the commander of the Libyan National Army to being the commander of a smuggling network. You would think that this would also irk the European Union or member states. He was received by the Meloni administration two weeks ago and given red-carpet treatment in Rome.

It’s one of those places where when you look at the political landscape, you look at the political fingerprints on the crimes that have taken place; Libya is like living in the upside down. Nothing makes sense. The more crimes that you pursue, the more spoiling that you pursue, the more reward you get. It also tells you a number of other things. The harder you push, the more you can get. For every Khalifa Haftar, you have a plastic one sitting behind him thinking, “I could be next,” and that’s damaging. That’s why what you were talking about, international norms, they’re not just words and abstract terms that people use to describe phenomena in textbooks. They matter on the ground because if you keep breaking these rules over and over again, then everyone thinks, “If he can do it, so can I.”

Unfortunately, it is a lot of the western actors, such as the E.U., are involved indirectly or directly with their money, perpetrating these crimes against humanity. There was a UN report saying that the crimes against a lot of the migrants and asylum seekers who are detained in Libya amount to crimes against humanity– rape and all sorts of inhumane conditions in which they’re detained. Yet the E.U. policymakers, as well as the U.S. policymakers, keep talking about this rules-based order, which they stand behind in European values. They’re just complete hypocrites when it comes to actually trying to implement policies that would foster those values.

Another area that we could speak about is how the E.U. has welcomed so many refugees from Ukraine who have been forced to leave their country. They should accept these people and treat them with respect and give them asylum. At the same time, there have been no legal channels for people to leave Libya or other countries in Africa that have been stricken by conflict and other calamities and crises.

Yep.

It’s just unfortunate to see that because the E.U. has been so present in those regions and in contributing to those crises. Yet there’s a racist element to it because when these people want to come to Europe and seek protection, then it’s, “Oh, these people are just economic migrants, so they’re not really deserving of any protection.”

I couldn’t agree more, honestly. I think the dilemma that I have in my mind, there are two things. The first is that racial discrepancy; it’s certainly not lost on an Arab audience because they started scratching their heads and saying, number one, “How come we’re not received in that way?” Number two, they don’t want to be received in the first place. They want to stay at home. There’s no refugee on Earth that ever wants to leave their home and take a boat, most likely die, be ignored and forgotten about and be described as cockroaches by other European heads of state and otherwise.

There’s something that is to be said about the fact that the best way and best policy for reducing a refugee crisis is to prevent violence from taking place in the first place. That’s where you find, unfortunately, the role of regional Arab states, the role of other European states, the role of the U.S., and Russia in Libya. They have their fingerprints all over that. I think some countries don’t care because they’re not on the receiving end. Libya is considered to be NATO’s southern flank and Europe’s soft underbelly. In many ways, the only thing that is of importance for a lot of policymakers today about Libya is to just stabilize it, and give it to someone to stop those boats from coming in. I think that’s really when you start to interrogate what their policies could have been over the last several years; why don’t you stop the malignant influence of regional actors? Why don’t you stop your own malignant influence of working with smugglers and calling them coastguards? I mean, there’s a lot more. I know this sounds strange saying this as a political analyst, but in a philosophical sense, there’s a lot of soul-searching that needs to be done when it comes to not only the policy-making on Libya but also the rhetoric. The rhetoric is deeply dehumanizing when it comes to places like Libya and places like Syria. If they’re called a human, that’s the best possible outcome. More often than not, they’re either, as it is, like a wink and nod or whatever, the idea that they’re either terrorists, terrorist sympathizers, or parts of criminal networks. It’s the most deeply dehumanizing thing to say about those that are fleeing from conflict and fleeing from terror, fleeing from criminal networks and fleeing from violence. Violence [inaudible 00:27:21] perpetuate.

It reminds me of Josep Borrell, the High Representative of Europe. He gave a speech; I think this was eight months ago or so, in which he characterized Europe as a garden which needed to be protected from the jungle. Just that metaphor; it’s so colonial. When he was called out as opposed to apologizing, he double downed on it and said that he didn’t mean it in a racist way but that Europe represents these lofty values that need to be protected from places like Libya, alluding to the warfare and the deaths and the horrible bloodshed that’s going on there. He missed out on the important part, and that’s how Europe has contributed to the perpetuation of these crimes in the region.

I think the Arab regional actors also play a role. The Emirates, the United Arab Emirates have played a huge role. I think initially they did not support Haftar, and now they do support Haftar. If you look at–

No, they were the first.

Oh, they were the first.

Yep.

Okay. They’re also involved in a neighboring conflict in Sudan. So in Sudan, there’s a war between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, which are led by General Hemedti. Haftar and Hemedti are also buddy-buddy.

They are fellows.