Another prime minister, another standoff with the militias. Libyan militias, larger than they ever were during the fighting against Muammar Gaddafi’s regime, protested outside government buildings this week. In some cases they prevented civil servants from entering their workplace. They also drew some support from public demonstrations.
The country’s size, desert and wealth will continue to be a magnet of all kinds of modern security threats
They gathered to pressure the Libyan parliament to approve a law that bans anyone who held a position in the Gaddafi regime from holding public office. The law was passed but the militias are saying they will not rest until Prime Minister, Ali Zeidan, resigns his office.
Meanwhile, over the past weeks we’ve had reports of attempts to blockade Tripoli, tribal clashes in some areas, and the Awlad Suleiman, one of the most redoubtable tribes of the south, fighting against the army in Sabha.
Such news usually brings with it much wise shaking of heads and murmurs about whether the former strongman was after all better than the present flux. But it’s the future not the past that I want to visit.
Libya is, for various reasons, a unique country but it’s also a flashpoint of wider regional tensions. Looking at the Libyan case helps concentrate our minds on the security threats that Malta’s foreign policy needs to address. Our Constitution commits us to be active peace-mongers but Libya shows how the security threats to peace today are rather different from those we faced when the constitutional provision was drafted.
Libya, like the poor, will always be with us. It is not entirely random that it was Tripoli that provoked the first show of might by the US marines in 1805; that the first Arab republic was declared in Tripolitania in 1918; and that it was out of the early anti-colonial resistance there that several of the first senior officials of the Arab League emerged three decades later. The loose institutions of the country, and the fact that it was never quite in step with the rest of the Arab world, have permitted futurist experiments as well as wayward governance.
Libya’s uniqueness and experimentalism will be with us for the foreseeable future. It’s the only country with over 90 per cent of its GDP derived from oil that is not a monarchy. It is one of the largest countries of Africa but has one of the smallest populations. It forms part of the Sahara, as difficult to monitor and control as the Amazon.
That isn’t a preamble for saying that, therefore, security concerns should trump democracy in Libya. Democracies, for all their failures, may be the most robust ways of dealing with security threats. My point is rather that, whether or not Libyans resolve their politics in favour of a working democracy, their country’s size, desert and wealth will continue to be a magnet of all kinds of modern security threats, both causes and effects.
The country is almost surrounded by failed and failing states. This affects the arms market, with Libya as an important node of the flow of arms, both in and out.
The difficulty of controlling the flow of arms is not new. The Algerian revolutionaries fighting the French in the mid-1950s were aided by arms coming from Libya. Today, those arms are flowing into Tunisia, not just in and out of Mali, where the arms might also be used in attacks on Algerian soil.
If the surrounding states are so unstable, that has a great deal to do with human insecurity in those states. Provisions of food and health are intermittent. Economic insecurity is interrelated with the ecological.
It’s difficult to assess climate change as an independent variable in causing wars over resources, and the subsequent massive flights of people. But we do know that refugees from resource-driven wars have ended up in Malta via Libya.
State failures and human insecurity provide a platform for terrorist groups operating in the area. Operating under the Al Qaeda franchise, to attract more attention, some are now trying to venture beyond Mali into Libya.
Some leftwing critics would insist that, together with these threats, one should add that of Western military operations, always on the lookout for a pretext for humanitarian intervention, while being actually motivated by the scrabble for finite mineral resources. Perhaps.
The fact is, though, that even with the best intentions dilemmas over international military intervention will continue to arise. The exponential growth of camera-carrying mobile phones has meant that it has become difficult for Western governments, operating under the pressure of popular demands, to ignore well-publicised atrocities, which will continue to occur.
Even for the most honest, scrupulous politicians, keen not to act merely in Western self-interest, there will always be the dilemma whether the responsibility to protect is overwhelming, in a given case, or whether intervention might actually jeopardise human security further.
It’s in this kind of insecure world, which Libya dramatises in its unique way, that Malta has to reckon how to define its national interests and how best to pursue its security and that of the region.
ranierfsadni@europe.com