By Abdel Bari Atwan:
WELCOME to the new Libya, a country ‘liberated’ by NATO which now finds itself without the oil revenues which could make it rich, with no security, no stability and assassinations and corruption at unprecedented levels.
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| Libyan cities destroyed |
Last Friday [September 13], the
Economist magazine published a report about the
implosion of Libya. My attention was caught by the
pictures that illustrated the piece – particularly
one of some graffiti on the wall of a seafront cafe
in the capital Tripoli. ‘The only way to Heaven is
the way to the airport’ it read.
The joke is indicative of the
troubled state of Libya nowadays following
‘liberation’ by NATO warplanes in the sky and the
revolution on the ground which toppled the
dictatorial regime of Muammar al-Ghadaffi.
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| A
newborn showing effects of bombing with depleted uranium. |
Recently I have met many people who
are visiting London from Libya and they tell stories
of life there which are hard to believe.
The capital Tripoli had no water or
electricity for a whole week.
The armed militia dominate and rule
the streets in the absence of a workable government,
a national security establishment and basic
municipal services.
Onoud Zanoussi, the 18-year-old
daughter of Abdullah Zanoussi, the former chief of
Ghadaffi’s security establishment, was kidnapped on
her release from prison following seven months
behind bars accused of entering her country
illegally. She was abducted in front of the prison
gates and the abductor was one of the guards!
Two years ago, the British and
French business community sharpened their teeth and
rubbed their hands with glee in anticipation of
their share of Libyan reconstruction. Now there isn’t
a single foreign businessman in Tripoli, all of them
ran for their lives after the assassination of the
American Ambassador and attacks on several foreign
Embassies and Consulates.
During the NATO bombardment, news
from Libya dominated the front pages and was the
first news item on every Western and Arabic
television station. There was 24-hour coverage about
the Libyan Liberation miracle and the great victory
achieved by NATO and the revolutionaries. Nowadays
it is very rare to find a Western reporter there and
even more rare to read a decent report about Libya
and what is really going on there.
Oil was the main objective and the
real reason for the NATO intervention; but oil
production has all but ceased due to a strike by
security guards on the oilfields and export
terminal. The ostensible reason for this strike is
the demand for a pay rise but there is another,
equally powerful, motive – they are protesting the
demands of various separatist movements who are
calling for self-rule for oil-rich Barca (Cyrenaica)
with its capital in Benghazi. Most of Libya’s oil
reserves are situated here.
Rather than the local or national
government, a militia is in control of most of the
oilfields and the export terminal; it has started to
sell huge amounts of oil on the black market and is
trying to expand these activities leading Ali Zidan,
the Prime Minister, to threaten to bomb any
unauthorized oil tanker going anywhere near these
sites.
The irony is that the same thing is
happening now in Eastern Syria, where the militia
and local tribes are in control of the oilfields in
Deir Al-Zour, refining the oil themselves by hand
and selling it on illegally. The same thing is still
happening in the south of Iraq.
Iraq and Libya, of course, have
‘benefited’ from Western intervention and Britain
and France have been proud to repeat what the mother
of the West (the U.S.) used to say about Iraq; first
in Libya and now – of negotiations fail – in Syria.
That is: intervention will bestow great
sophistication on the affected country which will
immediately become a model of prosperity and
stability and lead the way for other Arab countries,
which are ruled by dictators, to invite and welcome
military intervention. In fact, this model has
produced the worst kind of anarchy, failed security,
political collapse and disintegration of the state.
Chaos rules in Libya. The
assassination of politicians and journalists has
become normal news in today’s Libya, to the extent
that Colonel Yussef Ali al-Asseifar – who was
charged with investigating a rash of assassinations
and arresting the people behind it – was himself
assassinated on August 29 when men from an
unidentified group put a bomb under his car.
On the anniversary of 9/11 last week,
a huge bomb ripped through the Foreign Ministry
building in Benghazi.
Human Rights Watch has highlighted
another atrocity in Tripoli on August 26, 2013, at
the Main Corrections and Rehabilitation Institution,
known by its former name al-Roueimy, where around
500 detainees, including five women, were being held.
The prisoners were on hunger strike to protest the
fact that they were detained without charge and in
the absence of a fair trial. Unable to produce its
own security detail, the government called in the
Supreme Security Committee – composed of former anti-Gadaffi
militiamen – to put down the uprising. Militia
forces stormed the prison and shot the prisoners
with live ammunition, wounding 19 people.
The Prime Minister of Libya – Awadh
al-Barassi – resigned on 4 August and was replaced
by Ali Zeidan. Then, on 18 August, the interior
minister, Mohammed al-Sheikh, resigned after only
three months in post. He cited lack of support from
Ali Zeidan and the government’s failure to deal with
widespread unrest and violence, to gain the people’s
trust, or to adequately fund state agencies to
provide the most basic services.
Libya is simply disintegrating along
tribal and geographical fault lines. Most of its
people are in state of fury, including the Berbers
in the south, and national reconciliation is a
distant prospect.
Popular frustration is at its peak;
yet when demonstrators took to the streets outside
the barracks of the powerful ‘Libyan Shield Brigade’
to protest the unwarranted power of the militia, 31
people of their number were shot dead. The militia
act completely outside the law.
Suleiman Kjam, a member of the
parliamentarian committee for Energy, told a
Bloomsberg reporter that the government is now
spending its financial reserves after the production
of oil dropped from 1.4 million barrels per day
earlier this year to less than 160,000 bpd. He
warned that if this situation continues, in the next
few months, the government will not be able to pay
the salaries of its employees.
The Gadaffi regime – and we say this
for the millionth time – was an oppressive
dictatorship but Libya nowadays, with corruption at
it peak and security non-existent, is difficult to
understand or accept. Especially when we remember
that Libya was liberated by the most sophisticated
and advanced countries on the planet, according to
Western criteria.
Mr. Mohammad Abdel Azziz, the Libyan
foreign minister, surprised many in the West and
Arab world alike on 4 September when he objected to
imminent U.S. air strikes on Syria at a special
meeting of the Arab League he was chairing to
discuss possible intervention.
Maybe Mr. Abdel Azziz, like many of
his Libyan people, has formed his opinions as a
result of the experiences of his own countrymen
after Western military intervention.
We hope that the people of other
Arab countries, and particularly Syria, will learn
from the Libyan example.
It is true that some suggest that
this is a temporary state of affairs for Libya and
that following this transitory period, stability
will reign. They advise us to be patient.
We hope their prophecy will prove to
be correct but remain extremely skeptical with Iraq
and Afghanistan also before our eyes. (Global
Research)
October 03, 2013
