African leaders yesterday urged western nations to act to resolve the crisis in Libya which has sent shock waves across the vast arid Sahel band and threatened to destabilise fragile regional governments. A second round of UN-sponsored peace talks was due to open this week.
More than three years after a French-led Nato military action helped oust Libya’s longtime leader Muammar Gaddafi, two rival governments are competing for legitimacy, raising fears of a civil war for control over the country’s oil wealth.
In the messy transition since Gaddafi’s demise, Libya is bitterly divided between two rival factions of former rebels who have established competing governments and parliaments in a complex struggle for control of the North African state.
Libyan political void has allowed Islamists to regroup in barren south
Each faction claims the mantle of liberators, each brands its fighters the true army and each seeks international recognition in a conflict Western powers and African neighbours fear will split Libya in half.
Bullet-marked buildings along the border are testimony to the 2011 revolution. But fresh damage from air strikes this week shows how Libya is descending into a bitter split reminiscent of the anti-Gaddafi uprising.
One faction, Libya Dawn, seized Tripoli and much of western Libya in August by expelling rivals allied to the western region of Zintan. They set up a self-declared government, took over ministries and reinstated a former parliament.
Tripoli’s takeover forced Prime Minister Abdullah al-Thinni’s internationally recognised government and the newly-elected parliament to operate out of the east of Libya, controlling only a small rump of the vast desert country.
Al-Thinni calls Libya Dawn “terrorists” undermining democracy. He has teamed up with former anti-Gaddafi rebels from Zintan and a retired army general, Khalifa Haftar, who commands several aircraft and a number of army units. They have merged into the “Libyan National Army” (LNA), using air strikes to try to take the Ras Jdir border crossing from Libya Dawn’s “Libyan Army” forces.
The political void in the north has allowed Islamist groups to regroup in Libya’s barren south and from there threaten nations including Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad.
“As long as we haven’t resolved the problem on southern Libya, there will be no peace on the region,” Mali’s President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita told an African security forum in Senegal’s capital Dakar.
Mali became one of the first collateral victims of the chaos that erupted following Gaddafi’s ouster when Islamist fighters, many armed with weapons seized from Libyan government arsenals, overran the country’s north in 2012.
A French-led military intervention drove the groups, some with links to al-Qaeda, out of cities and towns, but they mount regular attacks mainly on Malian soldiers and UN peacekeepers deployed to the country.
African states accuse the west of ignoring their concerns and say that once Gaddafi was killed they left the country to fend for itself.
“Now Libya is fertile ground for terrorism and all sorts of criminals,” Chadian President Idriss Deby told the forum, adding that Nato had an obligation to finish what it started in Libya.