Patrick Smyth: Libya faces an uncertain future as militias hold sway

Four years on, and Libya is a basket case. Four years ago this week a rising in second city Bengahazi set in train the overthrow of the brutal dictator Muammar Gadafy. Today the country is deeply riven by a bloody civil war between at least three heavily armed militias, foreign embassies have closed, and in the last month alone an estimated 3,500 of its people were desperate enough to set off across the Mediterranean for a new life in Europe.

The issue was the subject of a fascinating seminar on Monday at the Institute for International and European Affairs addressed by Libya analyst Peter Cole and Mary Fitzgerald, this paper's former foreign affairs correspondent, both contributors to an important new book (The Libyan Revolution and its Aftermath (Hurst), and Drogheda-based doctor Dr Fatima Hamroush, who served as health minister in Libya's first transitional government.

Two competing governments and parliaments based in Tripoli and Tobruk claim legitimacy, although real power lies with the militias.

Some 3,000 people have been killed by fighting in the past year, 400,000 are homeless and nearly a third of the country’s population has fled across the border to Tunisia. Electricity is frequently down, and most business at a standstill; revenues from oil, Libya’s greatest asset, have dwindled by more than 90 per cent. Foreign reserves are draining away.

In the last week new escalations do not bode well. The execution of two dozen Egyptian Coptic Christians by the group affiliated to IS has led to air raids by Egypt threatening to further internationalise the war – the "Dignity" militia which backs the internationally recognised Tobruk government reportedly receives weapons and financing from Egypt, led by vehemently anti-Islamist General Sisi, from Saudi Arabia, and from the United Arab Emirates.

The Tripoli-based Libya Dawn, which this week launched its own first air raids, is backed by Qatar and Turkey, which support the Muslim Brotherhood, a key element of the group.

Peace doves

Jonathan Powell, the British special envoy to Libya, once Tony Blair’s lead interlocutor with the Provisional IRA, tells a story about attending early peace talks with Libya’s factions. The discussions were to be launched by the release of peace doves but, in apt metaphor for the peace process itself, the birds refused to leave their cages.

"I thought there was a mutually hurting stalemate which is the sine qua non for a settlement in most cases. I was wrong," he told the Guardian's Ian Black. "There was a stalemate but not a mutually hurting one. People could make advances at the margin and it wasn't really hurting. It suited them fine."

Libya has not reached the point at which Northern Ireland’s peace process began to move to dialogue – the internalisation by all sides of an understanding that there is no military solution, no possibility of a decisive victory.

While that remains the case the faltering dialogue being brokered by UN representative Bernardin Leon is likely to go nowhere.

Moderates

Leading figures on all sides admit as much, Jon Lee Anderson, a veteran journalist observer of the region, writes in the

New Yorker

. He cites Ali Tarhouni, the respected president of a constitutional assembly in the provincial capital of Beyda which is struggling to come up with an agreed new constitution: “The only moderates in this country are the ones who are forced to be. The military situation has to mature more before the conditions are ripe for a dialogue.”

Little wonder there is no appetite now for celebrating Gadafy’s overthrow and many wonder if things were not better then. But there’s little point to historical whatiffery about either the ending of Gadafy’s rule or the form of the western intervention that tipped the balance for rebels – in reality there probably was no right way, no simple road to democracy and peace. “Out of the crooked timber of humanity,” Kant reflected, “no straight thing was ever made.”

The alternative was hands off, leaving Gadafy in place, the possibility of a civilian massacre in Benghazi, and accusations of standing aside Rwanda-like during slaughter.The Nato no-fly edict and then bombing raids – the latter were profoundly mistaken, Hamroush believes – tipped the balance in favour of rebels, while the post-Iraq Nato determination that the revolution should not be helped by boots on the ground and should be Libyan-led ensured the consolidation of the power of militias and whose salaries, still to this day, quite remarkably, are paid from the coffers of the state.

Cole’s and Fitzgerald’s prognosis and hope for the country is a gloomy “don’t know”, their analysis of the forces that brought Libya to where it is riveting and vital.

psmyth@irishtimes.com; Twitter: PatrickSmyth1