The Battle for the Arab Spring

by Lin Noueihed

  Grandiose schemes to build marinas, hotels, hospitals, towers, airports, roads, factories and golf courses mostly failed to get moving, often due to infighting over money. In October 2010, several Libyan newspapers reported a scandal at the Economic and Social Development Fund (ESDF), one of the largest public-sector institutions with subsidiaries across various sectors, claiming that tens of millions of dollars had been siphoned off by senior management. The scandal prompted unusually strident criticism in the media – especially as the ESDF was theoretically meant to be owned by lower-income families. Senior officials, some of whom were jailed, stood accused of forging the minutes of meetings, transferring money to their own accounts, and colluding with foreign companies to take bribes.

  There had been efforts to clean up corruption. Some state companies or funds were given new management, sometimes appointed directly by Saif, and told to clamp down on a culture of graft. But that culture was an intrinsic part of Libya's odd politico-economic structure. It allowed oil wealth to trickle down without the need to implement any formal distribution mechanism and enforce ‘rules’, a practice in which Libya was not especially accomplished. Bribes and commissions paid on transactions large and small helped to offset the insultingly low salaries in the public sector, which employed some 40 per cent of the workforce on average wages of about $250 per month. It was a system aided and abetted by the cash economy, with most purchases – even of big-ticket items like cars – conducted in bags of notes rather than bank transfers.

  But corruption was one of the most corrosive elements of Gaddafi's Libya, hindering genuine economic development, providing no incentive for a long-term approach, widening divides and depressing swathes of young Libyans without the connections to get jobs or run successful businesses. Government policies had failed to meet the expectations of people who were aware of their country's oil wealth, and were beginning to wonder where it had all gone. Many compared themselves not with Tunisians or Egyptians, but rather with Qataris, Emiratis or Kuwaitis. There was such low trust in local healthcare, for instance, that most Tripoli residents would drive to Tunisia for even the most basic medical treatment.

  Infrastructure had failed to keep up with urban growth, with new areas of cities lacking paved roads and housing developments years behind schedule. And towards the end of 2010 there were unusual signs that patience was becoming seriously frayed. Local families took over a number of nearly-complete housing projects on Tripoli's Airport Road, angry that their promised new apartments were still unfinished and that they were still living in run-down districts. Others even attacked the site offices of foreign construction firms who were building the schemes. Their actions were not a serious threat to the regime, but coming on the eve of the uprising showed that frustration was already starting to boil over.

  Around the same time, the US ambassador in Tripoli became one of WikiLeaks’ biggest casualties. For the most part, Gene Cretz's reports from Tripoli seemed to confirm what people already suspected: US-Libya relations were still hugely uneasy, with much suspicion on both sides. The reports also contained plenty of juicy gossip on Gaddafi himself, who could go nowhere without his ‘voluptuous’ Ukrainian nurse and employed an aide to summarize Barack Obama's books for him. The cables mocked the comic ineptitude of the regime, one anecdote recounting how a Libyan ‘frogman’ sent to Italy for specialist diving training could not even swim. Cretz was forced to leave Libya in January 2011.

  Yet despite diplomatic hostilities, open popular frustration and splits within the regime, Gaddafi was not on the verge of collapse in late 2010. He faced no serious Islamist threat and no organized and unified political opposition, and was awash with money. Despite the less oppressive political and media atmosphere, as Human Rights Watch and others reported, political apathy was far more common than political activism. Just as the removal of Mubarak would not have happened in 2011 without the Tunisian revolution, so the Libyan uprising would not have taken place without the success of demonstrators in its two neighbours.

  The Cyrene Uprising

  Gaddafi was initially blind to the implications of both of the monumental events that had cleared out his neighbours. ‘You have suffered a great loss,’ he told Tunisians in an ill-judged speech made shortly after Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali had fled to Saudi Arabia. ‘There is none better than Zine to govern Tunisia.’ Like other Arab leaders at this time, he seemed to regard his country as immune to protests. Perhaps, like the Assad regime in Syria, Libya's leader felt comfortable because he was not aligned with Western interests in the same way that Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak had been. He also seemed to believe that his jamahiriya had long ago delivered what protesters elsewhere were seeking, and advised Tunisians to seek ‘the final destination for the peoples’ quest for democracy’.19

  That opinion was not universally shared by Libyans, especially those with deep-seated antagonism towards Gaddafi. It was no coincidence that the uprising was initially most successful in the north-east, home to Libya's second city, Benghazi, the seat of King Idris and historically a more important centre of learning and business than Tripoli. After the UN-brokered unification of the three historical provinces of Libya in the early 1950s, the official capital had alternated every two years between Tripoli in the north-west and Benghazi in the north-east, reflecting the long rivalry between the two cities.

  There was also a legacy of resistance in the north-east. Cyrenaica, as the eastern province was called prior to unification, was the home of Omar al-Mukhtar, one of Libya's few genuine popular heroes. He had led a campaign of guerrilla warfare against the Italians in the 1920s and 1930s, and was immortalized on film by Anthony Quinn in the (Gaddafi-funded) Lion of the Desert, which depicted the European colonial power in such a bad light that it was only shown on Italian television for the first time in 2009.

  Omar al-Mukhtar may have been an anti-colonialist, but he was also an Islamic fundamentalist who fought in the name of God. The north-east was Libya's religious heartland, the spiritual home of the Senussi order which rose to prominence in the mid-nineteenth century. Named after the Algerian scholar who founded it, the movement followed an ascetic brand of mystical Sufi Islam and opened up religious centres or zawiyas around Libya. The first, called the White Monastery or Zawiya al-Bayda, gave its name to the town of al-Bayda, where Saif accused residents of wanting to set up an ‘Islamic emirate’ in February 2011.20

  The north-east remained the most conservative region in a conservative country. In the final years of Gaddafi's rule, for instance, you would see far fewer women on the streets of Benghazi than in Tripoli. It was also a breeding-ground for Islamic militants, supplying hundreds of fighters for Iraq or Afghanistan and producing several senior and influential members of Al-Qaeda. The Libyan Islamic Fighting Group made several attempts on Gaddafi's life in the 1990s and was met with unforgiving repression, with some of the hundreds jailed among the estimated 1,600 who were killed in the 1996 Abu Salim prison massacre in Tripoli. Gaddafi also cooperated with Western intelligence services to provide information on suspected militants. One former commander of the LIFG, Abdel Hakim Belhadj, claimed to have been arrested in Malaysia in 2004 and secretly sent to Tripoli by the CIA, where he was put in jail.21 In 2010, he was pardoned and a year later was leading former LIFG members who were among the best-trained of those fighting pro-Gaddafi forces.

  Gaddafi himself had deliberately neglected Benghazi, relocating ministries and public company headquarters to Tripoli in the early years of his rule. A top-level push in the late 2000s had tried to stem the economic marginalization of the region, planning new projects that ranged from housing, hotels, sports stadiums and even a Benghazi metro. Several state-owned entities had been told to make quicker progress on projects in the north-east, but many – just like elsewhere in Libya – were inevitably mired in delays.22 Some were also a useless waste of money. A monument to commemorate Benghazi victims of a plane crash in Egypt in 1973 seemed to be making quicker progress than new housing, while another
unresolved sore point was a decades-old and malodorous sewage problem in Benghazi's lakes.23

  In the years leading up to 2011, open criticism of Gaddafi was more common in Benghazi than in Tripoli, and state propaganda on the streets was rarer. In February 2006, protesters in Benghazi had attacked the Italian consulate after an Italian politician had suggested that T-shirts should be made of the Prophet Mohamed cartoons that had appeared in Danish newspapers. The demonstrations broadened into a general protest against the regime, which responded with a mix of force – police killed at least ten people – and conciliation, with dozens of political prisoners released from jail.24 The 2006 protests began on 17 February, a date that would be invoked five years later to mark the launch of a much more serious disturbance.

  That disturbance had begun with small-scale protests in January 2011. Local residents in some towns followed the lead of Tripoli and broke into half-finished housing developments that were meant to be completed years ago. The protests gathered pace after the departure of Egypt's Mubarak on 11 February. A local lawyer, Fatih Terbil, was briefly arrested and then released in Benghazi on 15 February after a small demonstration. But the regime's response was at this stage muted, allowing rallies to go ahead and making economic pledges on housing and spending.

  On 17 February, residents in Benghazi and other north-eastern towns like Derna and Tobruk took to the streets on the anniversary of the 2006 protests. The rallies were biggest in Benghazi but other towns, both in the north-east and further afield, also saw unrest. A TV station called Libya Al-Hurra, or Free Libya, was set up by Mohammed Nabbous, a Benghazi activist, and streamed live footage out of the country. Nabbous was shot by snipers in March, but his role in covering those early events was considered instrumental in influencing local and international opinion.

  It is still difficult to piece together the sequence of events, but relatively quickly the peaceful marches had sprouted an armed insurrection. Rank-and-file soldiers, often from the towns where they were supposed to be quelling protests, defected or fled. They left behind unprotected garrisons and triggered a monumental spree of weapons looting that would go on all year. Towns like Tobruk and Bayda were among the first to fall from Gaddafi's grip, and a week later Benghazi was in rebel hands. Around the same time, the drawn-out and destructive battle over Misrata, Libya's third-largest city and an important economic and logistics centre, was beginning. Protests had turned into an armed insurgency as Gaddafi's forces tried to retake territory and key locations, including the airport, which had been captured by rebels. Months of shelling, fierce street-fighting and a siege would leave parts of the city in ruins by mid-summer.

  Meanwhile, senior figures had started to defect. Among the most important would be Mustafa Abdel Jalil, the Minister of Justice, and Mahmoud Jibril, the head of the Economic Development Board. They emerged as the two leading figures in the National Transitional Council (NTC) that was formed in Benghazi in late February, sending a bold message to the rest of the country. The NTC boasted a powerful symbol in the old monarchical flag, which was soon flying everywhere across the north-east, and from the start the council had the vital advantage of controlling a piece of Libyan territory.

  A mixture of terror, apathy and popular support kept Gaddafi in control of Tripoli and much of the surrounding area, where pro-government forces and alleged African mercenaries shot or arrested demonstrators and prevented any large-scale rallies. Gaddafi support remained solid in strongholds like Sirte, his birthplace, and in Sebha, Libya's fourth-largest city and the place where Gaddafi had gone to school. Relatively soon, despite the defections, it became clear that the disorganized rebels had neither the firepower nor the nationwide popular support to hold off the advance of the better-trained, better-equipped and more loyal military brigades which by early March were on the outskirts of Benghazi.

  With hindsight, perhaps Gaddafi's biggest error was the language he used to threaten the rebels. His now-infamous pledge to go ‘zanga zanga, dar dar’ or from ‘alley to alley, house to house’ to ‘cleanse’ the ‘rats’ and ‘cockroaches’ carried echoes of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, when Hutus described the Tutsis in similarly insect-like terms. Saif al-Islam's calls for dialogue and a ‘general assembly’ were ignored by both the opposition and the outside world, while his rambling speech threatening ‘rivers of blood’ prompted Western politicians to fall over each other in their rush to distance themselves from Libya's heir apparent. International calls for a ceasefire were either ignored by Gaddafi's forces or made impossible by the fact that they faced armed opposition. Even though Gaddafi promised an amnesty to those who gave up their weapons, threats of ‘no mercy’ to those who resisted suggested that a terrible vengeance would be visited upon Libya's second city.

  On 21 February, two Libyan pilots flew to Malta and defected, claiming that they had disobeyed orders to bomb protesters in Benghazi. The opposition claimed that a massacre was about to be perpetrated. Some warned it would be ‘another Hama’, referring to Hafez al-Assad's assault on that Syrian city in 1982, which killed somewhere between 5,000 and 25,000 people. The evidence for and against such a scenario is too long to discuss here, but the crucial point is that the humanitarian threat was considered great enough to justify a military intervention that would also serve the less altruistic intentions of those who led it. From the start, UN Resolution 1973 was about much more than just protecting civilians.

  A unique convergence of factors brought it about. The first was the humanitarian threat. Another was the curious role played by Bernard-Henri Levy, a wealthy French philosopher whom even the Parisian elite regarded as narcissistic. BHL, as he is known in the French media, met the new NTC leaders in Benghazi in the first week of March, then flew to Paris where he apparently persuaded President Sarkozy to unexpectedly recognize the council as the legitimate Libyan government. This took place on 10 March, without the knowledge of foreign minister Alain Juppé and just a day after senior officials had said France recognized ‘states, not parties’.25 ‘It will be very difficult now to make the blow jobs to dictators in the Arab world,’ Henri-Levy told Al-Jazeera a few days later. ‘The world has changed.‘26

  At the time, Sarkozy's world also needed changing. A poll had just rated him less popular than the far-right National Front leader Marine Le Pen, while he faced a potentially formidable adversary, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, in the 2012 presidential elections.27 France's dreadful handling of the Tunisian uprising meant the Elysée had already lost leverage over one North African government. Spearheading an intervention in Libya – as he would end up doing – could help Sarkozy's image at home and salvage something from the Arab Spring.

  The intervention also took place at a time when it felt as if the entire Arab world might be on the verge of revolution. In early March there was talk of a domino effect, a Berlin Wall moment that would sweep away Arab rulers from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. So far the West had been largely behind the curve, fence-sitting in Tunisia and Egypt until it became clear which way the tide was turning, while staying out of the Bahraini uprising. Libya presented an opportunity to join a battle that appeared to pit popular will against evil regime, and to emerge on the right side of history.

  Washington, Paris and London had effectively burned their bridges with Tripoli by this time, with all three calling for the Libyan leader to ‘go’ – if he had not already gone to Venezuela, as British Foreign Secretary William Hague claimed in February. Doing nothing would allow Gaddafi to regain control of the country and emerge isolated but dangerously hostile towards those countries that had abandoned or criticized him in the crisis. This was not an attractive political or commercial outcome for those countries.

  But a Western intervention so soon after Iraq would require Arab support. That too was on the table, but again was driven by more than just humanitarian considerations. It is hard to think of a case other than Libya, and a moment in time other than March 2011, where so many Arab countries would have either supported, or abstained fr
om objecting to, Western-led action in a Muslim and Arab country.

  The largest bloc in the Lebanese government, which co-sponsored Resolution 1973, included the two Shi'ite Muslim parties of Hezbollah and Amal. The latter's founder and spiritual guide, Imam Moussa Sadr, had notoriously vanished while visiting Libya in 1978, something that the party had always blamed on Gaddafi. In 2008, Lebanon had even issued an arrest warrant for the Libyan leader and other senior regime members. ‘Let no one think that we will forget or make any compromise,’ warned Nabih Berri, the speaker of the Lebanese parliament and Amal's long-standing leader, at a rally marking the 30th anniversary of the Imam's disappearance.28

  Libya's neighbours in Tunisia and Egypt were too preoccupied with their own internal strife to get heavily involved, and did not recognize the NTC until later in the year. In contrast, the two Gulf states of the United Arab Emirates and Qatar were ambitious, stable, wealthy and in pursuit of political and commercial influence beyond their own tiny borders. There was evidence that both countries, but Qatar in particular, provided military, financial and logistical support to the NTC from an early stage. Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah had a long-running spat with Gaddafi, who had funded a bungled plot to assassinate the Gulf monarch in 2004. In 2009, he had stormed out of an Arab League meeting after denouncing King Abdullah as a Western stooge – a rant that only ended when the emir of Qatar switched off his microphone.

  Riyadh would not mourn the demise of Gaddafi, and a war in Libya might divert attention from events closer to home. Two days after the Arab League voted in favour of a no-fly zone over Libya, on 12 March, Gulf forces entered Bahrain to help quell protests. Nascent signs of unrest in eastern Saudi Arabia even suggested that the kingdom might be the next Arab country to be overrun by mass demonstrations. If that happened, Washington could not and would not be able to prevent a bloody crackdown in the kingdom. Another argument had it that Western involvement was all about oil, an unlikely motivation given the lacklustre success of exploration in recent years and the fact that British and US oil firms were already active in the country.