The Battle for the Arab Spring

by Lin Noueihed

  In reality, Libya was a unique case at a unique time, and there could so easily have never been an intervention at all. Had Gaddafi not used such emotive language, had Bernard-Henri Levy not persuaded Sarkozy to recognize the NTC, had the Libyan regime courted more powerful Arab friends, then Resolution 1973 might never have been tabled at all. Cynics, and there were plenty of them, say the protection of civilians provided an insurance policy for sponsors whose ulterior motive was regime change. If their aims appeared fuzzy or the campaign went off course, which it did, then they could always fall back on the humanitarian angle and the deliberately vague wording of the resolution, which allowed ‘member states to take all necessary means’. Even so, Germany, South Africa, Russia, China, India and Brazil all abstained from voting, making clear that this was very much a US-, British- and French-led affair.

  It began on 18 March when French jets launched air strikes on Gaddafi forces outside Benghazi. Other armed forces soon joined in the coalition, with the US and British militaries bombing military depots, enforcing a no-fly zone and setting up a naval blockade. Washington played a lower-key role than Britain or France, who had to strongly twist Obama's arm to support intervention at all, but its moral and logistical support was vital in sparing European blushes. ‘The mightiest military alliance in history is only eleven weeks into an operation against a poorly armed regime in a sparsely populated country – yet many allies are beginning to run short of munitions, requiring the US, once more, to make up the difference,’ complained Robert Gates, the former US Defence Secretary.29

  After a week, NATO took command of the campaign and led it through the spring and summer as Gaddafi's arsenals of tanks and artillery, as well as his aircraft and command and control centres, were battered from above. Anything seen as threatening to civilians was fair game, with the idea being to create the vital momentum needed to bring Libyans out onto the streets to topple the weakened regime. It was hoped this would happen in a matter of weeks. But as the months rolled on, the country was effectively divided into two parts – areas that were under Gaddafi's control, and areas that were not.

  Only a week after the intervention began, then Arab League secretary-general Amr Moussa said that he ‘deplored’ the bombing campaign: ‘What happened in Libya is different from the intended aim of imposing the no-fly zone. We want to protect civilians, not the bombing of more civilians.‘30 Russia and China slammed NATO, accusing it of pursuing regime change under another name. African nations, including South Africa, pushed for diplomatic solutions and continued to criticize the interventions. From almost all quarters there were misgivings about the bending of the UN resolution, what exactly constituted a legitimate target, and how the intervention's success would actually be measured.

  A NATO air strike in April on what appeared to be a residential villa killed Saif al-Arab, a lesser-known Gaddafi son. On a tour of the destroyed compound hours after the attack, government minders pointed to furniture, a table football set and other innocuous pieces of domestic life that appeared to indicate that this was not a military target. Gaddafi and his wife had been there hours earlier for a get-together with their children and grand-children, they said, accusing NATO of deliberately trying to assassinate a head of state.31 In December 2011, however, Saif al-Islam claimed that the house had been used as a secret meeting-place between Gaddafi and Moussa Koussa, who had dramatically defected a month earlier, and that Libya's leader had been there moments before the air strike.32 ‘We are not targeting Gaddafi directly, but if it happened that he was in a command and control centre that was hit by NATO and he was killed, then that is within the rules,’ was how General Sir David Richards, the head of the British Armed Forces, put it in May.33

  Nocturnal bombing raids were frequent in and around Tripoli, but life appeared relatively normal on the surface. Traffic was quieter than usual, but shops were open, informal markets were bustling and some companies were still working. But trying to talk to people about what was happening in other parts of the country elicited little response in a climate of almost tangible fear. A shopkeeper near the Rixos Hotel, where foreign journalists were effectively kept under lock and key, openly criticized Gaddafi and his family before suddenly going quiet whenever a car pulled up outside or someone entered the shop. A television behind the counter was showing Al-Arabiya, whose coverage of the Libyan uprising was heavily anti-regime.34

  At a roundabout close to the city centre, minders excitedly showed journalists a small protest camp where dozens of African nationals were half-heartedly declaring their support for the Gaddafi regime and extolling the virtues of life in Libya. Other stage-managed trips included visits to ‘training camps’ outside of the capital, where uninterested groups of people, including some children, were receiving instructions at makeshift firing ranges in how to take apart machine guns or to fire rocket-propelled grenades.

  One young government minder at the hotel, wearing a smart jacket with a picture of Gaddafi on his lapel, was philosophical about the upheaval. ‘My mother showed me an old dress made out of the colours of the old flag,’ he said, ‘but I told her to put it away for now and we would get it out if Gaddafi goes. I'm wearing the Gaddafi pin for now because this is the guy in charge. If that changes I have the other flag at home as well.‘35

  The Endgame

  Somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 Libyans had been killed by early September, six months after the intervention was launched.36 When measured as a percentage of Libya's population, and in that time period, this was a bloodier death toll than Iraq. As the situation on the ground appeared to have reached a stalemate, the intervention grew increasingly active rather than protective. There was evidence that on-the-ground ‘spotters’ from Western special forces began working with rebels to identify targets.37 In the Jebel Nafusa mountains, south-west of the capital, the French had airlifted weapons to rebel groups, violating the terms of the UN resolution. And it would later emerge that Qatar had shipped in hundreds of its soldiers to train and assist in the fighting.38 The only way of defending civilians, it now seemed, was to attack Gaddafi.

  As the war struggled into a long, hot August Ramadan, several different groups of rebels, now better-organized but still suffering huge casualties, were moving towards Tripoli with increasingly robust air support from NATO. In Misrata, a largely home-grown resistance, often made up of civilians rather than army defectors and based on local resources rather than external help, had managed to lift the siege in mid-May in a hugely symbolic victory and one that gave the opposition a vital strategic foothold in the centre of the Libyan coastline. By the late summer several brigades from the city were on the offensive and beginning to take territory of their own.

  A stalemate persisted along the front in the north-east between Sirte and Benghazi, with towns like Brega and Ras Lanuf frequently changing hands between the two sides. In Jebel Nafusa, armed rebel groups were making gains and moving in on towns to the west of Tripoli. The western areas were vital in bringing in supplies and fighters across the Tunisian borders, with the town of Nalut in particular becoming something of an operations base. Qatari special forces were also reported to be training rebels in the area, as the opposition grew in both quantity and quality.39 Among the most prominent militia was that from the small town of Zintan, also in the western mountains, which had played an important role in spearheading the opposition's military effort and whose airstrip would be vital in receiving and controlling money and weapons flown in from the east.40

  Zintanis also helped break the deadlock in mid-August. Key to this breakthrough was the seizure of Zawiya and its oil refinery that brought the main road between Tripoli and the Tunisian border under opposition control and denied the capital its main supply line. It was as much a psychological blow as a logistical one, but essentially meant that the capital could now be encircled. A long-planned operation to storm Tripoli, dubbed Mermaid Dawn, rolled into action slightly earlier than expected. Opposition cells inside the city were activated. Some reb
els moved in by road from the west and others by sea.

  Dramatic scenes were captured on television during the night of 21 August, when rebels began entering Tripoli through its western suburbs. They were met not with resistance but with burnt-out cars, abandoned jeeps and the discarded uniforms of soldiers who had given up the fight and blended into the masses of people who cheered and waved the new Libyan flag. The next day, Tripoli residents walked freely around the newly-renamed Martyrs’ Square, having consigned its predecessor, Green Square, to the dustbin of history.

  A concentrated assault on the Bab al-Aziziyah compound, Gaddafi's sprawling headquarters in central Tripoli, now began. If the capital was to fall into rebel hands, then Bab al-Aziziyah had to be taken, and many suspected the Libyan leader himself was holed up there with his inner circle. A combination of NATO air cover and ground attacks by Libyan fighters and foreign special forces made swift progress, and on 23 August the first rebels began streaming into the warren-like complex, originally a royal barracks, that was thought to hold so many secrets. After killing or capturing the remaining pro-Gaddafi soldiers, rebel fighters – and the world's media – began to explore the compound that for decades had been a symbol of state power.

  They found the golf buggy that Gaddafi had driven around in his bizarre television appearances earlier in the year. They climbed on the giant bronze fist that crushed an American fighter jet, a symbol of Libyan resistance to the Reagan bombing of 1986. One man was delighted by finding Gaddafi's military hat in the former leader's bedroom. Others unearthed old Gaddafi family photo albums, documents and even home videos dating back decades that showed the former leader playing with his children. Many more concentrated on looting as much ammunition and weaponry as they could find, loading boxes of bullets, rocket-powered grenades and rifles into jeeps that were hastily driven off.

  But Gaddafi himself was not among the secrets that Bab al-Aziziyah offered up to its conquerors. It would later emerge that he and his family had left Tripoli by car days before the capital fell, and now seemed to have vanished into thin air. Wild jubilation and celebratory gunfire erupted in Tripoli at the start of the Eid al-Fitr holiday in late August, but a shadow still hung over their victory.

  In the meantime, little semblance of authority had emerged in the capital. The NTC leadership remained in Benghazi and seemed hesitant to visit Tripoli, let alone decamp there. Local councils and committees in the city began to be set up in the absence of any central power, and in the fear that outsiders might try to take over power. Old regional rivalries came to the fore again, particularly that between Tripoli and Benghazi. Tensions and disagreements rose as individual militias asserted their authority and their claims to the roles they had played in the overall uprising, and specifically in helping to free the capital. The shortcomings of the NTC became glaringly obvious as it was thrust from being a symbol of anti-Gaddafi resistance and a vehicle for mobilizing international intervention to actually having to assert control and authority. Yet despite some inevitable looting and lawlessness, there was surprisingly little chaos and bloodshed at this early stage, as Tripoli breathed again after effectively being under siege for six months.

  And finally, in late October, the shadow that still hung over the country was lifted. It was not until the pictures started appearing that anyone believed it was true. There had been so many false alarms, rumours and lies over the past two months that only hard proof would be enough. Mahmoud Jibril had claimed that Gaddafi was in the south of Libya, moving across borders with Algeria or Niger and protected by loyal tribesmen. Other ill-defined ‘NTC officials’ or ‘senior military commanders’ quoted in the media were confident that Gaddafi's movements in the desert were being tracked by satellite. All were wrong.

  The first image was posted online around lunchtime on 20 October. Taken at knee-height, it showed the top half of a man with bedraggled hair, drenched in blood, being dragged along by his shoulder. More photos followed, and then the inevitable videos, recorded shakily on mobile phones, were uploaded. Some showed Gaddafi mumbling incoherently while being slapped or beaten. Others showed the concrete sewer in which he and his bodyguards had sheltered after their convoy, trying to flee the besieged and ruined city of Sirte, had been hit by an air strike. Later, more graphic footage appeared to show one rebel fighter sodomizing Gaddafi with a stick.41

  ‘What did I do to you?’ were among his last words, according to eye-witnesses. It was reportedly an eighteen-year-old from Misrata who fired the fatal shot into the side of Gaddafi's head. But it did not really matter who the executioner was. After nine months, the first phase of the battle for Libya was finally over.

  Yet even in death Gaddafi inspired fascination and controversy. The ultimate piece of booty, his body, was driven to Misrata and laid out on a plastic sheet in a meat freezer. Still not completely convinced it could be true, many Libyans travelled hundreds of miles to see the corpse of the man who had loomed over their country for forty-two years. Lying next to his rotting body was that of his son, Mo'atassim, who had also been captured alive. A video had shown him sitting on a chair, calmly smoking a cigarette and talking to his captors. At some point in the ensuing few hours, he was executed.

  For the Libyans who had fought for so many months, perhaps Mo'atassim and his father deserved nothing better. Gaddafi lived by the sword and died by it, and in some ways this was a fitting end. But while most Libyans welcomed his demise and cared little about its method, others were also keen to see him held accountable in the dock. Had the NTC missed a chance to demonstrate that they wanted to leave behind the practices of the past and embrace the rule of law, beginning the new era as they would presumably wish to continue it?

  This misses the point. The NTC never wielded enough authority to control the manner of Gaddafi's death, even if they had wanted to. Their leaders had international legitimacy but not domestic legitimacy. The people in charge were rebel fighters who were largely free to take matters into their own hands, as they had been since the beginning of the uprising. That freedom was highlighted a month later, when militia members stopped a car that was driving out of the southern desert town of Ubari. They questioned a bearded man dressed in Tuareg robes who called himself Abdelsalam, but who on further inspection turned out to be none other than Saif al-Islam, on the run since the fall of Tripoli in August.

  The former darling of the West was swiftly flown to Zintan, a small town in the Jebel Nafusa mountains whose armed groups had risen to prominence during the uprising. As the debate grew about where and how he should be tried, Saif was now a bargaining chip in the jostling for control of key government posts and the perks that came with them.

  A week after the capture, the new interim prime minister, Abdel Rahim al-Keeb, announced the names of the temporary cabinet. The post of defence minister, one of the most coveted portfolios, was given to a Zintani. Technocrats were appointed to the finance and oil ministries, while other ministerial positions were allocated to representatives of groups that had played significant roles in the uprising. It was only an interim government, but it raised the question whether the underlying system of power in Libya would really change.

  Out of the Cycle

  In September 2011, the United Nations began an initial three-month support mission to assist Libya's political transition. It echoed the task that faced Adrian Pelt, the Dutchman appointed as UN special commissioner to Libya sixty-one years earlier, when he arrived in Tripoli on a fact-finding mission. Pelt's job was to craft a political structure that appeased both Libya's tribal representatives and the pre-eminent foreign powers, namely the United States, France, Britain and Italy.42 The outcome unified the three Libyan provinces of Tripolitania, Cyrenaica and Fezzan, to the south, and installed the reluctant King Idris as monarch.

  Some Libyans might just about remember the 1952 multi-party elections that followed. Dogged by accusations of vote-rigging, they triggered unrest that ultimately led to political parties being banned and left tribal, regional and
financial influences to shape how Libya was run. The resultant structures were weakened by too many divergent forces until Gaddafi's band of officers – one of several groups that were plotting a coup in the late 1960s – seized power. Libya is not the same country it was in the 1950s or the 1960s, but its new leaders have inherited many of its old problems. History could repeat itself unless the series of battles going on in the country, some of which have been bottled up for decades, are resolved.

  In the short term, it will be almost impossible for the new government not to inherit the way that Gaddafi distributed power between different groups. It is the only means of holding the country together through a long transitional period, not least because the revolt happened in stages, with some towns and cities leading it from the outset, others joining later on, and yet more still resisting. In Benghazi, the birthplace of the NTC, there is concern that the city will again be ignored now that state institutions have been moved to Tripoli. Misratis, Zintanis and many others want rewards for the role that their militias played in the fighting, and the human sacrifices their towns made.

  Those rewards may include control over certain ministries or public-sector funds and companies allocated generous budgets from oil revenues. Just as under the old regime, these risk being treated as private fiefdoms, run through patronage, and making little progress in developing the infrastructure, housing or healthcare services Libya so desperately needs. Those groups that lack revolutionary legitimacy, those who supported Gaddafi, and those with minority voices may be sidelined. The Berbers, for instance, deliberately marginalized under Gaddafi but important in his overthrow, boycotted the interim government in November after no one from their community was given a position in the new cabinet.