Good evening and welcome to this week's Zoome Webinar. From the Middle East centre, this week's topic is Libya.
Past, present and future.
And I'm delighted to invite you to hear two fantastic speakers who are beaming in from abroad, not exactly from Libya at the moment.
They are Mary Fitzgerald and Assume Komati.
Libya's 2011 uprisings offered an early example of the dangers of the regional upheavals when met with the military might of a recalcitrant dictator.
The civil war that ensued and ultimately led to the killing of Gadhafi in October 2011 marked
the beginning of a challenging transition that has been held up by repeated setbacks,
complex civil wars, wars by proxy and shaky cease fires. The future remains uncertain, but deserves our attention.
Our two speakers for this evening are Larry Fitzgerald and Anas Komati.
Mary is a researcher specialising in the euro Mediterranean region with a particular focus on Libya.
She's reported on and researched Libya since February 2011 and lived there in 2014.
An associate fellow of CSR King's College, London, she has conducted research on Libya, the International Crisis Group,
the European Council on Foreign Relations CFR, the United States Institute for Peace USCAP, amongst many others.
Previously a journalist. Her reporting on Libya has appeared in publication, including in The Economist.
Foreign Policy. The New York Financial Times.
And she's also the contributing editor to an edited volume on the Libyan revolution and its aftermath with Oxford University Press.
And Assume Komati is the founder and director of the Tripoli based Saddiq Institute,
the first public policy think tank in Libya's history, established in August 2011.
He has held several positions in the region and Europe as a visiting fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Centre in Beirut,
a visiting lecturer at the NATO Defence College in Rome.
And he is a frequent contributor on Libya and many affairs on Al-Jazeera, BBC, France 24 and Sky News.
Many of us have watched him on a regular basis as a commentator on these channels.
He's the author of Libya's Islamists and Salafi Jihadists The Battle for a Theological Revolution.
In the edited volume The Arab Spring Handbook published in 2011 by Routledge.
And so it gives us great pleasure here in the Middle East centre to invite the two of you to speak.
I have committed to mention myself and somehow as any other department lecturer in contemporary Islamic studies,
and it gives me great pleasure to kill Mary first.
If you can give us your take on how we should look at Libya today in light of a decade of revolution.
Thank you very much, Osama. And thank you very much to the Middle East centre for organising this event.
The week before, Libyans will mark the anniversary of February 17th,
the day many Libyans consider was the beginning of the uprising that ultimately brought about the end of the Gadhafi regime in 2011.
The protest that started on February 17th, February 15th,
actually a couple of days before with the arrest of a terrible lawyer who represented families of the victims of the Abu Salim massacre,
a massacre in the Abu Salim prison,
the most notorious prison in Gadhafi's Libya, which had taken place in 1996 in which around 1200 prisoners were killed by regime forces,
according to Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and other human rights organisations.
Those anti regime protests that started and snowballed in Benghazi, Libya's second city, soon tipped in to an armed uprising.
And I think it's interesting to compare what happened in Libya in early 2011 with what had already happened in Egypt, neighbouring Egypt and Tunisia.
In that in Libya, those anti regime protests very quickly became an armed uprising against the regime,
partly to do with the regime's own response to those gathering protests that had happened in February.
And also, as we know, that armed uprising then later brought about, it led to a NATO led intervention mandated by the U.N. resolution.
So all of that made Libya quite distinctive in terms of what happened early on in 2011 and obviously made it very different to Tunisia and Egypt.
I arrived in Benghazi about 10 days after those very first anti regime protests started.
And what was striking at that time, this was just before the opposition announced the formation of the National Transitional Council,
the body that was to be the international community's interlocutor on the part of the opposition throughout that year.
And what was really striking for me in Benghazi in those early days and weeks before the U.N. resolution mandating the NATO intervention,
was this sense of fear, a sense of fear in terms of how the regime had already responded to those
protests and how the regime may respond as those protests started to quicken?
And of course, that was what was behind the whole push for intervention, the whole push for that U.N. resolution mandating that intervention.
As we know, the uprising continued.
The rebels took control of Tripoli, the capital, in August, and Gadhafi was caught by rebels and killed at the hands of rebels in October that year.
One thing I was really struck by in late 2011 and early 2012 was how optimistic many of the Libyans who supported the uprising were about the future.
And many internationals who are looking at Libya at that time also were quite optimistic.
There was a sense that on paper, at least,
Libya had all the signs of possibly being one of the success stories of what at that time many people were collectively terming the Arab Spring.
On paper, Libya could appear deceptively straightforward country of just six million people, urbanised population predominantly in comparison with,
say, Syria and Iraq, homogenous, relatively homogenous society with not so much the pronounced ethnic cleavages of Syria and Iraq.
None of the sectarian cleavages of Syria and Iraq and an educated population.
None of the literacy challenges of neighbouring Egypt, for example. And then, of course, on top of all of that, Africa's largest oil reserves.
So on paper, Libya appeared to have many of the ingredients that could lead to a success story.
But I think what wasn't discussed enough at that time was the fact that you were lifting the lid on
42 years of rule by Moammar Gadhafi and Gadhafi's Libya wasn't your common garden variety autocracy,
if you like. This was a very unique and very idiosyncratic experiment in autocracy.
So when Gadhafi's regime collapsed, it soon became more apparent what the nature of that regime was,
how Gadhafi ruled, how his 42 years in power had shaped Libyan society,
had shaped the way Libyans dealt with each other, interacted with each other, had shaped the institutions of the state.
And I think that at those early stages, there wasn't enough understanding of that internationals.
I would say as well that between 2011 and 2014, a couple of fateful decisions were taken.
That really helped set the course for the turbulence of post Gadhafi Libya.
The first fateful decision was to basically give a state salary to those who claim to have been fighters and during the uprising,
anti Gadhafi fighters during the uprising.
That led to a situation that from 2012 on, you had over two hundred thousand men who were armed on state salaries.
And that continues today. And that led to the situation from 2014 when Libya tipped into a civil conflict where you had belligerents on both sides,
fighters on both sides drawing state salaries.
And, of course, at that dynamic also helped encourage the growth of more armed groups.
So we saw the armed groups that had emerged during the uprising against Gadhafi.
They grew in size. And then we saw the emergence of new groups in the post 2011 period.
So that militia dynamic was something that emerged from that fateful decision to award state salaries and is fed by it still today.
The other fateful decision was in 2013,
when a mix of zero sum and politicking in the first elected parliament of the of the post Gadhafi period that was elected in summer 2012,
a mix of zero sum politicking inside that parliament and threats of force by the various armed groups pushing for this.
At the time brought about a sweeping lustration law, the so-called political isolation law,
which barred whole swathes of officials who had connexions with the previous regime,
thereby hollowing out at a lot of expertise in the machinery of the state institutional expertise.
In one fell swoop. But it also made the whole question of reconciliation in the post Gadhafi period all the more difficult.
It fed those tensions and what has been striking to me in recent years is in conversations
with people who are some of the strongest proponents at the time of that lustration law,
many of them now regret that it was a sweeping, as it turned out to be.
They believe it was actually a mistake at that time. So it is interesting to talk to Libyans who played key roles either during the 2011 uprising
and in the critical period between 2011 and 2014 to see how they look back on it now,
the mistakes that were made, what they would have done differently, how they would have done it differently.
But I would also add that what is interesting in the last couple of years and indeed concerning,
is the amount of revisionism we're seeing creep in to the conversation on Libya,
whether it's the Libyan conversation about what happened in 2011 and since or indeed the international conversation on Libya.
So to give one example, I've noticed over the last year or two, I see several references in different places, media references, et cetera,
researchers references to Libya's 10 year long civil war,
which to me is an extraordinary assertion to make because many would describe what happened in 2011 as civil war.
But Libya between 2011 and 2014 was not in a state of civil war.
There were skirmishes throughout the country. There were certainly tensions.
But at that time, Libyans didn't talk about their country being in a state of civil war.
So I think we have to be really careful in terms of how we look back at what happened in 2011, what happened particularly between 2011 and 2014.
I see 2014 as the critical year in the post Gadhafi period.
And we'll we'll talk about that later in terms of what happened that year.
But, you know, I think between 2010 and 2014, we have to see that examine that separately and then look at 2014 as this pivotal year.
A couple of things about 2014.
One thing I think is very important to bear in mind about that year is the impact on Libya of what had happened in Egypt in 2013.
And by that, I mean the military coup to oust the government of Mohamed Morsi.
And then, of course, what followed there.
And it's interesting to see that Libya, in its post 2014 trajectory, tipped more towards echoing what had happened in Egypt than,
say, what had happened in Tunisia, where in undoubtedly fragile transition.
But Tunisians managed to forge a sense of consensus in their political conversation.
They managed to have conversations about the past, transitional justice, conversations, et cetera.
That didn't happen in Libya. And I think the impact of what happened in 2013 in Egypt on Libya in terms of certainly and I lived in Libya in 2014,
the Libyans who wanted a repeat of what had happened in Egypt to happen in Libya and the Libyans who were
fearful that a repeat of what had happened in Egypt in 2013 would happen in 2014 happened in Libya that year.
So that created a very febrile atmosphere in Libya in early 2014,
an atmosphere that was really ripe for someone or something to come along and tip the situation,
tip the transition as it stood at that point, and that someone did come along.
Khalifa Haftar, who I think when we look at the last decade in Libya.
Stands alone as a singular figure, a singular figure in terms of his ambitions,
in terms of his actions and critically and I think this is really important in terms of the conversation
about where Libya's is at today and in the future in terms of his backing from an array of external actors,
which unfortunately has become a key aspect of the Libyan conflict since 2014.
So I would end there with those opening remarks because I think they lead to a wider conversation about what's happened since.
Thank you so much. This has really been a really comprehensive sweep, given how short of a time you are given or allotted for this.
And it really gives us a sense, right from the beginning of 2011 down to the present, the sorts of challenges that we face in a place like Libya.
The hope that existed, the polarisation that was brought about, in a sense,
in the post 2013 context and the emergence of the precipitating, in a sense, Libya's second civil war.
And I think also you highlight something which is very important, which is that people don't pay attention to Libya.
And so they will make these sort of offhand remarks, even reasonably informed observers, that Libya has been in civil war for 10 years.
And, of course, you made very clear that that wasn't the case and that the second civil war emerged out
of this effort to imitate what happened in Egypt on the part of some of like Heffter.
I think now is an opportune moment for us to hand it over to a.
To give perhaps a perspective on what the future holds. And of course, and it speaks with considerable experience living within Libya for many years.
Although he joins us, interestingly enough, from Turkey. Sir, the floor is yours.
Thank you so much. Thank you very much for kindly hosting us today. And thank you again to the Middle East effort for hosting us today.
I don't want to draw in too much from what Mary has said. I think I concur with Mary's kind of timeline.
I think the interesting points that Mary has made take into where I want to pick up from this.
But I will say something about the past, because we are approaching that decade anniversary.
And I think it's important because there are so many that watch Libya. There are so many that right on Libya, so many that analyse Libya.
That essentially in this conundrum, how do you describe the conflict in Libya?
How do you describe the binary, if you want to go for for that now?
There has been several attempts there unless that tried to describe Libya as a battle between Islamists and secularists.
There were those that tried to define it between its regions,
the historic rivalry between the west and the east of Libya when there were there are new attempts to try to define it by the greed of the actors,
a ideology, the history, the regionalism plays no role in this.
And that is really just about dollar bills, essentially.
So I think with all of that in mind, I found myself in this conundrum pondering it for the last year, really,
whilst I've been writing various papers for the institute, whilst I've been analysing the situation from afar.
And it's given me a perspective that we can't wrench Libya from its context.
But we certainly got mentioned from its context and doesn't leaven and we can't wrench it from its context in the broader region.
And what I mean by this is that if we tried to understand what happened in 2011 and a series of almost like cardiac arrests
of these kind of moments that have shaken the system in Libya but have also drawn thousands of people to the fight.
And I agree with what Mary was saying earlier on. There were skirmishes.
Many of these moments can be characterised by certain flickers between certain camps in Libya, certain regions in Libya,
certain elements of greed pertains to some of the actors that are making their way into political life.
But in my view, I would say that there are two irreconcilable visions of the state today in Libya.
And broadly speaking, that is a war that is ravaging the entire region, is a war that has been going on for many years.
That also encompasses what Mary was trying to illustrate about the events and doesn't infighting
and the knock on events that took place in May of 2014 with the emergence of Khalifa Haftar.
Now we can get rooted down in the personalities we can say to us of, well, Libya's complicated.
And, you know,
there are so many differences amongst us people amongst its different categories of fighters and armed groups from all over the country.
But if we think of the of the times that matter, there are three essential moments.
2011, the moment that galvanised hundreds of thousands of Libyans across the country to either demonstrate or go to the front
lines and fight the very same moment that took place again in 2014 with the emergence of the first civil war after Halifa.
Those emerges in 2014 and the latest chapter in that civil war.
April four thousand nineteen.
With the emergence of Khalifa Haftar in western Libya trying to overthrow the last U.N. backed government, the government of National Accord.
Why do these moments matter? Because they galvanise. They were, in my view, this kind of political lightning rod moments.
They weren't straight line skirmishes. They weren't neighbourhood localised fights.
Tens of thousands of civilians, many of whom dropped their weapons in 2011,
picked their weapons up again, either in 2014 or in the latest chapter in 2014.
They left their small local communities from across the country and made their way to the capital.
Why? And I think part of this reason is also trying to describe this event to Libyans is also trying to describe the experience of Libyans.
Libyans have experienced military rule in the past. They experienced the Jamahiriya.
Now we can again go into the analytical rigour of which groups, from which cities and so forth.
But the perception on the ground matters because that perception provoked so many thousands of people to turn to the front lines.
And what I mean about this all in the grand scheme of things,
is that these two irreconcilable visions are at the roots of the diplomatic efforts today to unify the country.
And we've been down this road before. We've seen that film before, 1014 and fifteen in Libya's first civil war.
And I think the essence of that for me and the relevance of this is that there was an inability to acknowledge the differences between the two camps.
And I think you can find yourself looking at the emergence of Khalifa Haftar and saying, well, could we find an alternative?
Could we find someone that's different? Could we find someone without such a chequered history?
But if we monitor or look from where Mary left off in 2014, fifteen.
And look at the subsequent years of negotiations since at least 2016 to 2019.
We see that there has been one consistent demand from Khalifa Haftar side.
And that demand has been to reconfigure the presidential council of this U.N. backed government.
Now, the presidential council is more than just a symbolic figure or symbolic position.
It's the supreme commander of the armed forces. That position is a defining characteristic.
It's a defining hallmark of democratic states. It defines the character of your states.
If you have a civilian presidency that can assure that neutrality and subservience of your military, then it's one clear marker, not the only marker.
But it's the clearest marker of living in a free and fair society or democratic state.
If you have the inverse where it's the military that are in control of your presidency, as you find is the model in these old dates.
I'm living in Turkey at the moment. I'm staying in Turkey.
This Turkish word, Askhat, the Arabic word Ascoli, the Turkish Turkish word for soldier ascaris states where essentially you can think of 1952,
Egypt as one of those models and models across the region where the state is so
finally intertwined with the military that you can't pull one to the other.
Those are military states.
And the real hallmark of the states is the presidency, a position that should be held by a civilian, is controlled by the military.
And if we don't have that separation of power, if we don't have a subservient military, then essentially you live in a military state.
And that is what is essentially being offered by Phillip after it's at the heart of the negotiations that we've seen over the last four or five years.
And it's a central line that divides not only Libya and not only the permanent ceasefire line that today stands in the centre of Libya,
in the city where Gadhafi died in October 2011. What is so important about that aspect is it almost divides the region east of Sirte.
You find that a lot more gulf, at least in the Gulf, in the mush, Rick, you find military states west of Sirte towards the Maghreb.
You find that states have accommodated for this, have bridged this, have gone through that their maturer and they accommodate for other challenges.
Some of them are constitutional monarchies. Some of them are civilians, states, democratic states like Tunisia.
And then you have states like Algeria that are undergoing a major, major transformation but are still negotiating that since the 1990s.
So I think for me, that is like Libya's Iron Curtain.
And I think that's what for me is the only way to describe Libya and not it from its initial context.
So I'm not gonna go on too much because I think Mary has already given us so much substance from the earlier period.
But I think that's the only way to describe it.
And I would say, and I have called this, it is almost like a political culture war that is ravaging the Middle East and North Africa right now.
And it's funny that we're there now in 10 years. But I shudder to think what the future holds,
because I think given that Libya has resisted or Libyans have resisted for the last two civil wars, this model,
I find it interesting that we're in a new conundrum where that model still hasn't been
spoken about in negotiations or at least within the UN framework for negotiations.
But I'll leave it to you or somewhat provoke more questions and elicit better answers from Marion for myself.
Thank you so much. And send. I think you touched on a number of very important points.
Your closing remark highlighted the UN's involvement. You have also yourself then both of you been in touch with the UN actors in the region.
And also, in a sense, there's so much background to give to the Libyan context.
Mary, you did a wonderful historical overview.
And unless you sort of pointed out some very important aspects of the current Libyan situation, but in a sense,
you presupposed a bit of knowledge and the sense that people aren't always aware of the East-West divide in Libya,
the fact that the Western government is backed by the UN and in essence,
Khalifa Haftar, who we've spoken about, has loomed large, very large in the last decade of Syria,
although his stance seems to be waning considerably in the present and potentially being
replaced by other comparable actors to himself who have the support of his backers,
as it were. The challenge with someone like him who is getting so much international support, in fact,
including from Western states, but who represents hostility towards a U.N. backed government.
And so we have this, in a sense, a contradiction in the way in which supporters outside the country are interacting with the Libyan situation.
And, you know, I would like to ask both of you in a sense that to a certain extent,
is it the way in which policymakers and international observers and powerful actors in the international community.
Approach Libya in this very contradictory fashion, which has allowed it to perpetuate its civil war,
would put it in the plural, its civil wars without proper resolution.
And what could they do differently and why aren't they doing it?
This is kind of the big question about Libya right now. And I'm putting it to you at the beginning.
I want to let everyone know you can ask questions. Wolter Armbrust won't be kindly sort of curating them and sharing them in just a moment,
but I just want to start off this conversation by asking both of you this question.
How do we address the Libyan conundrum in light of the international contradiction in many respects in the policy world?
And Mary, if you'd like to go first and then a. Thank you. Thank you, Asama.
Well, again, I think it's instructive to go back to that very early period after the end of the uprising.
And again, look at what was done, what could have been done differently, how the trajectory might have turned out differently.
And in terms of the international engagement,
Libyans from a very early stage at the end of the uprising told the U.N., told other internationals, we can do this.
We want a light footprint, a U.N. mission. You know, we will be able to oversee our transition.
And they were very forceful in that argument, very forceful in their insistence on that.
It is interesting now to have conversations with two Libyans who insisted that at the time,
who now regret that and believes that that was actually a mistake in hindsight.
One of the many regrets in that one of the key challenges in the three years,
the post 2011 period at those critical years was did your how you deal with these revolutionary
brigades and the other armed groups that were starting to spring up in the environment.
I outlined earlier how you deal with them. You know, one of the challenges of Gadhafi's legacy was that after his fall,
the Libyan army, as it was at that point, had been utterly hollowed out by Gadhafi.
Gadhafi came to power in a military coup in 1969, and he was terrified that somebody would plot a coup against him.
And there were attempts over the 42 years of his regime.
So what he did was he emasculated the army to ensure that it was not capable of a coup against him.
Instead, what he did was he empowered brigades led by his own son.
So there was that familial loyalty there. But it meant that after the fall of his regime, security was a major challenge.
You had all of these revolutionary groups, many of them regionally based, based in cities and towns,
loyalties to their communities, loyalties to their tribes, loyalties to political currents, et cetera.
And no one was able to kind of pull that together.
So, again, going back to how right Libya was in early 2014 for someone or something to come along, that was a key part of it.
And, you know, when Khalifa Haftar came along and in February 2014 and, you know,
issued a video, basically he was accused of of attempting a coup at that time.
People laughed at that early stage. But when he emerged again in May in Benghazi, he managed to gather substantial support base.
Why? Because Benghazi was a city that was plagued by insecurity, plagued by assassinations, plagued by bombings, et cetera.
So there was an opportunity there. And Haftar came along and took it.
Looking back at 2014 again and talking about the kind of international approach
to Libya and particularly on the role of external meddlers in the country,
which is, you know, a key part of the conflict.
Since 2014, there was an effort to impose narratives on Libya that fit other regional realities outside Libya.
But we're totally at odds with Libyan realities.
And as mentioned earlier, the you know, this false idea of a secular versus Islamist conflict in Libya.
That's not the case. You know that this is not that kind of ideological battle.
In fact, since 2014, if there is one driving force in the Libyan conflict, it is a struggle to control Libya's resources, its oil wealth.
That's essentially what much of this boils down. Other aspects of the conflict since 2014 are merely ancillary to that.
So I think we've we've seen regional powers since 2014 who were involved in their own regional power struggles that have then played out in Libya.
And then more widely, you see countries that are allied with those regional powers,
be they France, for example, in Europe, close to the UAE, which is one of the meddlers in Libya.
So all of that has kind of had a knock on effect on Libyan dynamics.
So we can talk about the role of the U.N., what the U.N. could have.
Should have done better since 2011, but also I think the role of the external actors, specifically the external meddlers,
those countries that have been violating the U.N. arms embargo on Libya blatantly since 2014, and no one has managed to to rein them in properly.
Thank you very much, Mary.
And I'd just like to remind everyone that you can put in your questions and we hope to get to them straight after and its response to
the question about international engagement that NSA and perhaps you can also tie in with the point that you made about in a sense,
this is a challenge of how we confront military dictatorship as a model that is being appealed to by certain international actors.
And Mary kind of highlighted the fact that the chaos that in a sense is precipitated in the context of war.
Nic, some people actually yearn for that sort of authoritarian stability.
He said in some respects, very problematic phrase that reminds us of things like Oriental despotism and perhaps he could comment in nature.
Those two sort of aspects of the question. But certainly. Well, I think.
I mean, I want to also touch on this one, because I think it's it's an interesting model.
You know, Mary has spoken about how Gadhafi gutted the army after he came to power in 1969 following a military coup.
He had done that for the first several decades. But in the early 1990s, he began to realise that there were challenges from Libyans of all stripes.
And I think one of the things that he did in 1993 following an attempted coup in the town of Bani Walid in central Libya,
was to try to bleed into the lower tier army, which is essentially what it was called under the Gadhafi regime.
It's causational Bucca named after Boubacar Yunis, the former defence minister of Libya.
He bled into it, tribal loyalty. One of the reasons for that is that Libya's Libya's revolution is also a giveaway as to why this was the case.
It wasn't just a national civil war. It wasn't people rushing from east to fight in the western west to fight in the east.
They were intercommunal battles. Libya was truly a fragmentation of the local community level, and it was neighbours fighting against neighbours.
One of the reasons for this is that Gadhafi had selected particular tribes that
lived on the peripheries of certain cities to blend them into the lower army,
not an army that was designed to fight.
There was an army that was designed to acquire a certain amount of social and political privilege and a certain amount of power.
But in a sense, coup proof the regime by extending their regime into the bloodlines of local tribes.
This was one of the ways in which he felt that he could avoid uprisings, because if there was to be an uprising or a coup or a,
you know, a protest against his rule, it would be neighbouring communities that would put it down.
He wouldn't have to do it from the central level. He reserved his own power, his own Praetorian Guard, essentially, that was led by his own sons.
He was out of that for external opponents, but then had to start fighting on the local level.
In 2011, it was a very chaotic time.
And that model essentially is what Khalifa Haftar has mimicked since 2014 with the support of countries like Egypt,
countries like the United Arab Emirates, France and Russia. And the architecture of that is exactly the same.
There is a tribal army, for example, in the east of the country. It's often quoted that the East supports Haftar.
Which segment of the East often find that people say we'll have to represent something in the east.
If we look at the tribes that are represented in the east,
it's 12 percent of the tribes or the inhabitants of the east are represented in the senior command of helicopters army.
It's 88 percent of the population are not represented. So there is something that is going on.
It's ironic that only a small portion of the society represented in an army that often calls itself the Libyan National Army.
Now, that framework, that architecture is so important because it's concealed behind the narratives that Mary was talking about.
It's concealed as a Libyan national army that is fighting against, you know,
a national threat of other Islamists and terrorists, a narrative that was imposed essentially from the outside.
And it's quite funny because when you look at the journalists that came to eastern Libya and 2014 and asked what is happening here?
Who are you? Well, where are the army and where fighting ISIS or al-Qaida in Arabic.
That wasn't the case. If you look at Arabic media, they would often say, well,
where the Bedouin and we're fighting the Jews and the Turks over there often find that peculiar
because it would often that that kind of rhetoric that conceals it's easy to conceal it in English.
It's not so easy to conceal it in a local language.
And any anthropologist, what I picked up on this in 2014 and any anthropologist would pick up on the structures,
the embedded tribalism within these structures that is being carved out now for the last six, seven years.
Now, I think it's funny that the need for narrative to impose itself on that was important because they're playing from the same the same playbook.
Haftar also has a Pretoria and God, led by his own sons and a son in law with a very kind of sweet loyalty to the father or fatwah.
So you have his sons and his son in law or you have radical Salafi medicalise from Saudi Arabia who follow a fatwa from the primal.
But clearly in Saudi Arabia, who has designated Khalifa Haftar as the as the ruler of Libya since, doesn't know.
It's a very peculiar branch, a very peculiar architecture of an army, but it is one that Libya hasn't experienced.
With that, for me, was the hallmark of the Jamahiriya under Gadhafi.
So I think that's where I think the subject of the of the military.
But it also gives you an idea about if that's what's been going on for the last seven years.
Khalifa Haftar has not been able to. Has not been. Legitimately the head of an army since 2015.
December seventeen thousand fifteen. How has he been able to go from a small foothold in the east of the country to
trying to overthrow the UN backed government in Tripoli within four years?
And I think what's been so peculiar about this and why it's so relevant to a decade on is that in 2011,
when the U.N. passed Resolution 1973, there were skirmishes at the UN Security Council.
Russia abstained. China wasn't happy, but they passed that legislation and it gave a green light to NATO to intervene.
In April 2011. If we go 10 years later.
States that were that were worried, particularly regional states like the United Arab Emirates,
like Saudi Arabia, who were fearful of the Arab Spring at that time,
they wised up, and especially the UAE,
who have transformed from a small but a medium power to one of the most aggressive and activist powers the region has ever seen.
And the way they've been able to accomplish that is through something that no one, I think, really predicted and doesn't love in.
Essentially a very simple to procuring diplomatic veto at the UN Security Council level and at the European Union level by bridging and
forging alliances with France has a very crucial role in being both the EU member states and as a member of the UN Security Council,
but also Russia, who also play that role with them at the U.N. Security Council and by being able to do that.
They've not only been able to, you know, break international norms,
and I'm saying because they've got social such little time to go through with this.
But an example of that is that when you think of the ways in which not only wars are fought,
but how wars are funded, the most peculiar aspect of the past decade for me is something that's quite banal.
Russia funded Khalifa Haftar by counterfeiting or printing counterfeit Libyan currency in their
own national mint cognac and sending around 10 billion dollars worth to the east of Libya.
No country on the planet would be able to do this apart from Russia,
by being able to break those kind of norms, international financial norms and the way that it has.
So just to summarise this kind of point,
by being able to erode those norms and being able to conceal the actions of a power like the UAE or Egypt or Khalifa Haftar,
that procurement of a diplomatic veto was so crucial because Khalifa Haftar wasn't only able to just launch that war.
He was able to launch on April 4th, 2019, in the presence of the chief of the UN, Antonio Guterres,
who had just arrived in Tripoli to announce a national reconciliation conference.
It's baffling, but it's only now, given it's been a decade that we can cannot absorb such a major,
major transformations and not only in Libya, but in the international order that we rely upon to give us stability and to give the security.
Can I interject a couple of questions?
Now, we've got a large number of questions coming in and we're not going to have time to get through anywhere near all of them.
But let me ask a couple. One is from Patrick Jeffrey, who is the EU International Relations and Diplomacy Studies.
And his question has to do with something you just mentioned, which is that Russian forces remain in the city of Giuffre access following the
January deadline for their departure and trying to the nationwide cease fire.
And his question quite generally is what does Russia hope to gain from its involvement in Libya?
What is their end game? And let me throw out another question to you as well, because we're going to run out of time.
And this one is from Peter MILIT, who was the British ambassador to Libya from 2015 to 2018.
And his question is that the UK is often seen by Libyans as an important player.
But in recent years, the British government has been preoccupied by its own problems with Brexit and with coded questions.
What role can the UK government play now to bolster the UN agreement and to support a possible unity government and help build stability in Libya?
So two questions. One to do with Russia, the other to do with the UK, to both of you think.
The first one has to do with Russia. Why is Russia involved in this? What do they hope to gain from it?
And I said, you would like to take that. Yeah, sure, I'll take that quickly and I'll let you to the second question, Mary.
But in a nutshell, Russia's playing a very intriguing game.
And I would say that the only way to understand that is by looking at the other players.
The other players are playing Chequers. They have a very binary set of choices in front of them,
either that is trying to support the UN backed governments and establishing a essentially a civilian democratic state.
I would say or they're trying to, you know, return Libya to a military leader or a military or to return legitimate rule.
And there are very strict binary choices and binary objectives and what they're doing in Libya.
Turkey, perhaps, is the peculiar actor in that it has geostrategic ambitions, given that there is the eastern Mediterranean gas based in the.
But Russia. Russia is not playing Chequers, Russia. Russia's playing chess.
Russia has been able to carve out a space in search of flight. That is more important than just Libya.
Libya and the southern Mediterranean, is that the southern flank of NATO?
And by. By being able to just forge and carve out that role.
We can't only just see in the context of the repositioning of that in the last six months or in July of 2020.
But go back to Watford and December 8th, 2020. Go back to the comments of Emmanuel Macron at the last NATO conference.
He called NATO braindead. I essentially called into question why NATO's alliance exists.
Why should we be anti Russian? Russia is going to be a crucial partner for a country like France in subsaharan Africa,
where France has a very keen interest in making sure that has a foothold in southern Libya into the Sahara and SA health space.
But when you look at the way that NATO has brought interaction, you know, it's a long and it's a very old machine and the logic is that, you know,
there are different logics that underpin each state within NATO, its eastern flank, its Baltic states feel Russia's presence every single day.
They see a Build-Up of a ammunition. They see an aggressive Russia moving, whether it's in its actions in Georgia and in Ukraine and Crimea.
But then you have states that are in the Mediterranean or in the western and southern flank of NATO that don't see Russia and don't feel that problem.
And Russia has been able to carve out a space right in the southern Mediterranean and really call into question two key actors.
Turkey, who supports the Jenay? And France, who support Haftar and the Libyan national army, the LNA and the Fusion,
or the massive fissure that has erupted between those two key member states of NATO is essentially, I think, really what Russia's end goal is.
This isn't about Libya and it isn't about having a decisive win. They had a decisive win in Syria.
They could have called, I think, and had a decisive win in Libya. But a protracted conflict really plays into Russia's hands.
And I would say just watch. In that sense, everyone else is playing a Chequers. But but Russia continues to play chess to our detriment.
OK. What about the role the UK is, the role of the UK would be in affairs?
Well, I think what I'd like to do is bring the conversation back to what's happening in Libya today and what's happening on the ground in Libya.
Because I think very often the conversation on Libya has become a very geopolitical conversation that is quite
disconnected from what's going on on the ground in terms of some of the dynamics shaping Libyan society at the moment.
And right now,
we have just had a U.N. led dialogue forum that elected a new executive authority to put together a cabinet and oversee the country for the next time,
months until planned elections in December.
Parliamentary and presidential elections are what are planned, and these elections will be the first elections that Libya is experience since 2014.
Libya has actually only had three sets of national elections since the fall of Gadhafi.
One parliamentary election in 2012.
Then there were elections to form a constitutional committee, a committee tasked with writing Libya's first constitution in decades.
And then in 2014, the second set of parliamentary elections.
And one thing I think many are wondering about, you know,
if we reach a stage where in December elections can take place and there are all kinds of caveats about that,
because a lot of things can happen in the 10 months in between.
But say we do reach that point. There are many people wondering, first of all, what kind of turnout we might see in those elections.
It was very striking to watch what happened to the kind of euphoria, if you like, about democracy, a democratic transition amongst Libyans in 2012.
There was an enormous turnout for those first elections. I was in Libya for that election day.
I was in Benghazi. There was a euphoria. There was a sense that Libya had gone another important step in its transition.
Fast forward to 2014 and the turnout plummeted.
It was a tiny turnout and something that undermined the legitimacy of the resulting parliament.
There are real concerns that we may face into another low turnout in December or some of
the elections more recently in Libya for municipal councils have shown a low turnout.
So there is a question as to whether Libyans as a society are basically not so and armoured with the idea of democracy and not,
of course, raises real concerns in terms of what kind of trajectory Libya might be on in terms of its transition.
You know, Haftar spoke to a significant percentage of the Libyan population that felt that their most important priority was security.
They felt they wanted what Haftar presented, which was a close eye military rule, if you like, or at least that model.
He is far to the Egyptian model in many respects. And that spoke to a lot of Libyans.
I think the question now goes back to what Ana said earlier is, you know,
the competing visions for what Libyans would like to see as the Libyan state.
What does the Libyan state look like in the future? Will it be a democratic civil state?
Will it be some kind of attempt at a cois ie military role?
Have to remember is in his mid 70s. So I think that's worth bearing in mind as well.
The question of what may be left once Haftar is no longer on the scene in terms of what he has constructed in eastern Libya,
the forces he has built up, the forces he and his supporters will an army.
What will the legacy of that be and the polarisation we've seen within Libyan society over the last six years,
that the deep wedge that has formed between East and west Libya driven by media narratives.
You know, there has been an intense war of narratives in Libya over the last six years.
So I think looking forward, this question of what does a future Libyan state look like?
What kind of state do Libyans want at this point after the last decade where they have experienced democracy,
at least in the form of minimally of elections? What do they want now?
On what do they aspire to? I often remember in 2011, after the uprising, Libyans were many Libyans told foreign journalists, you know, just wait.
Within five or 10 years, Libya will be like a Dubai on on the Mediterranean.
That's what we aspire to. Other Libyans said they wanted to be Switzerland on the Mediterranean.
Ten years on, I think the question of what a future Libyan state will look like,
what Libya will look like 10 years hence, I think that's the interesting.
And in terms of what kind of state will actually emerge from what we see now.
I also had a question from Michael Willis in relation to one of the neighbouring states,
which I don't think has been mentioned once in the whole evening, but which arguably has a significant stake in Libyan affairs, which is Algeria.
Can either of you say anything about the role of Algeria and the current Libyan situation?
I think Algeria. I'll make this very brief. In fact, where we're publishing, hopefully in the next week a publication called The Great Game.
And looking at the 12 pirates that have shaped Libya over the past decade, Algeria being one of them.
And I think I think actually the author actually is in the room with those yahoos about.
So I think I'd probably defer to him to speak about this, but having looked at Algeria over the past decade,
Algeria is undergoing its own transformation with the headache over the past 18 months.
And I think despite those changes, I think Algeria is true.
Role has been too often called that head giant. I think that's that's a very easy kind of statement to make.
But I think Algeria had played a diplomatic role in Libya's last civil war.
But I think going forward, Algeria is concerned with two things power, politics and the regional interference,
particularly by Egypt and their own struggle to reshape the hegemony over the African Union over North Africa following the fall of Gadhafi.
But there's a lot that hinges on Algeria's own domestic changes, but it's still to really early.
I think Algeria could have played its hand many, many years ago and has decided, given its long history of non-interference,
it's decided that it prefers diplomacy over interfering in the domestic affairs of a neighbouring states.
Barry, do you have anything to add to that? So it was kind of just pick up very quickly on Mary's last points.
Yes, and that's very important as we are moving towards elections over the next 10 months.
I think what's so important and what's so interesting about Libya experience with the last decade is the degradation of daily life.
And I think what's so fascinating about about that is it's a very, very lived experience.
It's such a brutal experience.
The Danish Refugee Council in the summer during Koban at its peak, said that living conditions in Libya were apocalyptic.
You know, if you just think about that for a moment and think what that means,
daily water cuts or water cuts to three million people at one point during the last civil war,
there are electricity cuts that are already intermittent now.
But our entire blackouts in some places of the country for days, the inability to get cash, physical cash.
And Libya as a cash economy. The inability to get cash frequently, conveniently or predictably for nearly a decade.
Just think what that does to the political psyche of your average person, to any person, in fact, in the country.
And think about what that does to your decision making when you move towards elections.
We often think about ourselves in Europe or in the U.K.
You know, thinking about the decision making that was taking place during Brexit, you know, irrespective of which way one stands on,
that was on the discussion, it was the way in which people really believed that their lives were at risk.
And it was the way in which they believed their lives needed to change. But their daily living conditions hadn't changed at that point.
If we look at what's happened in Libya over the past decade, there has been a major transformation in that.
And what concerns me is that when you are living in such quote unquote apocalyptic conditions,
how do you decide soberly how do you make such a good decision and do you not get more drawn?
And do you not become more ripened to making quite extreme decisions?
Do you not become more ripened to listening to quite simple ideas,
very simple lethal ideas about explaining a very complex phenomena, fiscal service delivery, geopolitics?
And you start saying, well, why did we just give it to someone? So why don't we give it to the side of that side?
And I think to go back to what Mary was saying, that experience is something that I think essentially didn't need to happen,
irrespective of the disputes and the conflicts in Libya over the last six years. Why has electricity not been managed?
You don't need a prime minister from the east or for the West to have your electricity infrastructure repaired.
Not something that really concerns Libyans. I'll leave this on an anecdote.
I was in Spain last year and the Spanish Foreign Ministry, to their credit,
who don't have much bandwidth in Libya, asked what could we do to help Libyans?
Could we support the UN mission? Can we talk on diplomacy? Can we talk on national reconciliation?
And I thought, you don't have the bandwidth, but I did joke an injustice. I said, if you want every single Libyan east western side to love,
you have a conference about delivering electricity in Libya or delivering water in Libya.
They will love you for that.
Just break the mould of the continuous conversations and essentially respond to very desperate needs that Libyans are living under.
That, I would say indirectly have shaped the minds of many Libyans that today, as Mary was saying or asking themselves, who should we support?
And making quick binary decisions on things that are quite complex. Thank you.
That's very helpful. And actually, we have had a number of questions.
I'll just summarise them, asking for more information about the local dynamics of what's going on in Libya, both in terms of what's going on now,
in terms of the balance between any attempt that somebody might make for state building as opposed to security,
but also in the longer term, the social conditions leading up to the fall of Gadhafi.
I don't know if we have time for any more discussion, but if I could just make a few final points.
I think following on from what I said about the discontent in Libya over living conditions and, you know,
last August, we saw the biggest demonstrations, the biggest nationwide demonstrations in Libya since 2011.
They were basically driven by grievances over widespread corruption, poor living conditions, and just the frustrations that come from all of that.
One final point. If you look at the demographics of Libya.
Libya is a predominately youthful population. Some two thirds of the population are under the age of 30.
We're now looking at a younger generation that has no real lived memory of the Gadhafi era.
So talking about the Gadhafi era, you know, framing what's happening now through that particular lens doesn't resonate with that generation.
It's a generation that has been shaped by the experience of 2011 and by the experience of the last decade.
And I think we really need to think a little bit more about that generation that is emerging, how it sees the Libyan state,
how it sees its future, its demands, its grievances, the very real frustrations it feels right now.
And one final word in terms of those including the U.K. and other countries that are wondering
what they can do in terms of supporting this new transitional period should it succeed.
After this new executive has been established, I think thinking about Libya in those terms,
those future terms and looking at that younger generation, looking at what it's demanding, how it has been shaped.
I think that's key because it's often something that is missing in the conversation on Libya,
just that useful segment and how they may view things very differently from the
older political figures that international interlocutors are dealing with.
Thank you very much, Mary.
This has really been an amazing conversation, a very wide ranging conversation, and it's nice to sort of end on a note of youth,
youthful hope, he could say, because in a sense, the youth represent the future of this country going for decades.
And I think it's entirely to the point to highlight,
including the policymakers in the audience and the people involved in thinking about how Britain or other countries should engage in the region.
That that aspect of the region be highlighted. I'd like to thank you both, Mary, and.
I'd like to thank Walter for handling the questions. I'd like to apologise to those whose questions we didn't get to.
But this has really been a wonderfully informative evening about a very
challenging subject and one which I hope we will try to give more attention to.
It's one of the topics that Libya doesn't get as much attention as many of us would like,
and it persists in facing a number of challenges as a consequence, I think.
So with that, I'd like to wish you all a wonderful evening and a wonderful weekend in advance.
And see you in a week's time in a week. We will have.
Actually, I wasn't entirely certain who will be presenting next week.
So if one of my colleagues could very kindly perhaps jumped in and inform us that we will be welcoming.
Vitaly Donkin, Aleksey Vasiliev, we'll be speaking about Russia in the decades since the Arab uprisings of 2011.
How apposite. After it after a discussion on Libya.
So we would love to have you there in a week's time. Until then, good evening from Oxford.