A potentially disturbing growth of the relatively secret objectives of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) in the MENA region has revealed some startling new revelations: mainly Britain’s probably inadvertent and indirect assistance to MB aims.
This important linkage was brought into light by accident two weeks ago when Britain’s Libya Ambassador Peter Millett made a passing comment about the Libya Central Bank (CBL) while addressing an all-party group on Libya in the House of Lords.
The background is important to understand. The CBL has a key role in any Libyan peace deal. Its former (though he contests this) governor Saddik el Kabir was invited to the British Foreign Affairs Select Committee last November to explain his plans for knitting the country back together.
But Millett gave a bit more information than he intended this month when he publicly accepted the fact the CBL was paying the very militias who are tearing the country apart. A sensational and rather naive admission.
“There is a real problem with the proliferation of militias,” he said in comments reported by The Daily Telegraph’s Colin Freeman.
“The fact is that all main militias are still paid for by the CBL. Bored young men can join a militia, then they have a salary and something to do.”
For good measure, Millett recounted a story he had heard about who really wears the trousers in Tripoli.
“I am told that in 2012, a gun was held to the Minister of Finance’s head and he was told ‘sign that cheque’. They were told that the easiest thing was simply to buy off the militias.”
This has caused extreme jitters among British and European banks holding CBL funds, while oil traders particularly fear they will fall foul of American,if not British, legislation prohibiting the funding of rogue armed groups.
The CBL’s response was a ringing denunciation of the claim, while insisting its payment system in Tripoli is above board. Millett himself took to Twitter as his words echoed in the world’s media, not to deny his comments, but to insist they were taken “out of context”.
Finally common sense has prevailed by military men over the UN, diplomats and politicians
It is such a sensitive issue because of the peculiar situation of El Kabir. He is an accomplished banker, but was fired from his job in September 2014 by the internationally-recognised parliament, and who has residency in Malta.
Some Libyan parliamentarians object to his being a director of a secretive British company, ISNAD, which counts among its other directors Ali Salabi, one of Libya’s most prominent Islamist preachers and senior MB members.
But while Tobruk is the recognised government, the bank headquarters physically remain in Libya Dawn-controlled Tripoli, and Kabir has refused to acknowledge parliament’s power (in Tobruk) to dismiss him.
The grounds for dismissal are clear. Going back to pre-Gaddafi, there has always been a law that precludes undeclared interests being held by senior public officials.
Nevertheless Kabir has plenty of friends in London. Such as Portman Communications, owned by Tony Blair’s former press man Tim Allen, who trumpeted his appearance in Westminster before the Foreign Select Committee some months ago.
Ironically if Kabir wants advice from powerful Brits he could shout down the hall of his registered office ISNAD which is headquartered at the same central London offices, 50 Broadway, as Tony Blair’s Windrush charitable institution.
A lucky coincidence.
Blair of course opened up Libya to the world after his famous meeting with Gaddafi in the desert in 2004.
One result of that meeting was Gaddafi’s agreement to free his Islamist prisoners, in exchanges mostly brokered by Salabi who mediated with the dictator’s son, Saif al Islam Gaddafi, since indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court and now in jail in Zintan in Libya.
Blair’s rapprochement with Gaddafi included the liberation of a particularly high-profile political prisoner, Abdul Hakim Belhadj, also an MB supporter, who is now suing former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and MI6 in London’s High Court claiming they were complicit in his US rendition to Libya.
All this in turn raises the quixotic approach to the Muslim Brotherhood by British Premier David Cameron. On the one hand, he denounced it in ringing terms when redacted parts of the Jenkins report was published in December, saying it was a “deliberately opaque, habitually secretive” organisation.
As a result, the government would treat membership of, or influence by, the MB as a “possible indicator of extremism”.
Yet last week the Prime Minister’s special envoy to Libya Jonathan Powell, another Blairite, told the Foreign Affairs Select Committee that the Muslim Brotherhood “were one of our best options” for a Libyan peace settlement. Is there a disconnect within Whitehall?
Serious questions will undoubtedly now be asked as a result of this new information particularly by the All Party Foreign Affairs Committee, one would assume notably about Blair former staffers.
Britain’s Foreign Secretary John Hammond was not at the security conference in Munich recently, but perhaps he should have been, given how intimately Libya’s current governance is entwined with London.
Given its five years this month since the so-called revolution in Libya which was only successfully achieved by NATO bombing, the international community in Munich earlier this month still focused on its climactic attempt to ‘fix’ Libya and organise a puppet government selected by the UN, called the GNA. And as we know, it failed yet again.
The good news is that clearly behind closed doors the Pentagon and USAF had secretly decided airstrikes against a number of Isis targets, notably a most important one in Sabratha, west of Tripoli. Finally common sense has prevailed by military men over the UN, diplomats and politicians.
With Isis dug in and bashing the oil ports and people smugglers waiting for the spring tides before pushing another wave of unfortunate humanity across the Mediterranean to Europe, anxiety to get something done was and is high, so this action by the Pentagon was a great relief to many.
Presumably further military action by the USAF will mean continued air strikes in Libya so now what’s left for the West’s politicians, particularly the EU, to do is to investigate the link, if any, between the Muslim Brotherhood and Isis.
Richard Galustian is a security analyst.