The Battle for the Arab Spring

by Lin Noueihed

  Such a system might be inevitable in the short term, especially to get fighters off the streets, but it is a recipe for long-term instability. While there is no sectarian divide of the type that devastated Iraq and which might rear its head in Syria, deep-rooted and often intense divisions separate many parts of Libya along ethnic, local and racial lines. Its people are not ‘all one tribe’, as many Gaddafi opponents often claimed in 2011. Old but still potent feuds between towns and extended families threaten to destroy the fleeting unity that brought them together under the banner of revolution. Some of these quarrels go a long way back and now, out in the open and with a weak central state to control them, could be difficult to resolve.

  So will racial tension. Slave-trading in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has now been replaced by human trafficking, with corrupt officials complicit in shipping illegal immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa and onwards towards Europe. Old attitudes persist. Even though many Libyans from the south are naturally dark-skinned, many were assumed in the heat of war to be Gaddafi mercenaries and often received brutal treatment, with rights groups documenting evidence of beatings, executions and torture by pro-NTC forces.43 One particular flashpoint was between Misrata and Tawergha, a smaller nearby town whose name derives from the word ‘Tuareg’ and many of whose residents are immigrants from the south or descendents of slaves. Misrati fighters threatened to wipe Tawergha off the map, with one local militia defining itself as ‘the brigade for purging slaves, black skin.‘44

  Dealing with these militias presented the most daunting immediate task for the interim authorities. With no enemy left to fight, apart from each other, the disparate array of armed groups around the country had looted enough weapons throughout the year to fuel a long civil conflict or mount attacks on central government. It remained to be seen whether the new government wielded the skill and authority to disband them or incorporate their members into the military. Many reports also suggested that weapons had been smuggled out of Libya and into the hands of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which operates in the effectively lawless parts of the Sahara desert that straddle Algeria, Mali, Niger and Chad. Gaddafi's security forces had struggled to contain raids by militants crossing into south-west Libya, and the country may now be more vulnerable to attacks from that source too.

  Libya's south received scant international attention during 2011, but any new government cannot ignore it. This vast, largely empty region shares porous borders with Niger, Chad, Sudan, Algeria and Egypt that are virtually impossible to control. In the south-west, semi-nomadic Tuareg have long wandered freely from country to country across artificial borders that exist only on maps. Not all Tuareg are or were pro-Gaddafi, but his regime had some success in winning loyalty by supporting their campaign for greater autonomy in Niger and Mali, or by integrating them into Libya itself, sometimes through naturalization or recruitment into the military. Some Tuareg assisted Gaddafi's family and inner circle during 2011, and with his defeat were now moving out of Libya and into neighbouring countries, where some believe they pose a new threat to stability.

  Incomes are lower, unemployment higher, and tribalism stronger in the south than on the coast. Gaddafi had embarked on ambitious plans to develop tourism in a region that had become a hot spot for European adventure travellers and boasts a collection of prehistoric rock art in the Jebel Acacus, one of five UNESCO world heritage sites in the country. Libya's under-construction rail network was meant to run southwards from the coast to Sebha, then ultimately down to Niger, providing a new export route for landlocked countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Picking up those projects will be vital in providing jobs and winning over outlying constituencies, some of whom have a history of rejecting central control.

  As in Tunisia and Egypt, there are differences of opinion about the role that Islam, and Islamists, should play in Libyan state and society. Mustafa Abdel Jalil, the man who emerged more than any other as the leader of Libya's revolution, exacerbated tensions in October when he unilaterally declared that polygamy would be legalized and that banks would not be permitted to charge interest. But Libya is a more uniformly religious society than Tunisia or Egypt, and while greater Islamist influence after the Arab Spring could bring meaningful changes to everyday life in those two countries, little will change in Libya.

  An existing ban on alcohol – imposed by Gaddafi in 1969 – now stands even less chance of being lifted, while measures similar to those announced by Mustafa Abdel Jalil in October would likely be accepted if they do go to a public referendum. What angered many people was not necessarily their content, but the fact that they were unilaterally declared instead of being put to public opinion. Yet they played to the concerns of prominent figures like Ali Sallabi, who along with other Islamists had accused the NTC of being too secular and Western-oriented in its views.

  Political parties with Islam as their guiding tenet will probably garner support in any elections. As with Egypt, there are likely to be different types of Islamist party, ranging from the moderate to the ultra-conservative. Among the biggest winners from 2011 are the groups of Islamist fighters, especially in the north-east, who had played a leading role in the uprising. Men loyal to Abdel Hakim Belhadj, the former commander of the LIFG, were put in charge of Tripoli's security immediately after its capture in August, and although Belhadj himself was not given a position in the interim government, he is likely to remain influential and appeared to have powerful patrons in Qatar.

  As the final section of this book discusses, there are many ambiguities in how Islam is written into any new constitution. As in Tunisia or Egypt, this will be a delicate process fought over by different groups. But the main fault lines in any new Libyan political structure will relate more to the distribution of power and money between different regions. Any unbalanced system that fails to use oil revenues in a more efficient and distributive way than its predecessor will not last long. Libya might lend itself to a system of devolved rule, but this carries its own problems, as persistent squabbling over Iraq's oil resources has shown.

  Aside from religion, new political parties and their support bases will be primarily shaped by localism rather than ideology. This force is not as strong as it was in 1950, when Adrian Pelt invited seven representatives from each of Libya's three provinces to discuss the formation of a new national assembly, but regional allegiances will make a heavy imprint on any new government. The more cosmopolitan Tripoli, where localism has been eroded by urbanization and overseas influences, is a world away from the interior. Political parties might be based on individual towns, risking the different militias morphing into their armed wings. When combined with the strong regional affiliations, this threatens the creation of states within a state.

  Like the fractious militias, the somewhat disparate band of countries who were united in the goal of removing Gaddafi also have their individual ulterior motives. Gulf states like Qatar or Saudi Arabia are allying themselves with the Islamists, and as the final section of this book argues, they have their own interests in seeing an Islamist-dominated government. The old colonial-era powers like France, Britain, Italy and the United States are jostling to win contracts, attract Libyan investment and gain local influence to help justify the financial, military and moral support they gave to the revolution.

  But Libya will not be transformed overnight from one of the world's most difficult places to do business into an efficient, transparent and investor-friendly haven. Some problems in the business environment, like bureaucracy, corruption and infighting, are unlikely to get better quickly, and others will get worse. Similarly, while the new authorities may well play less hardball on energy contracts than Gaddafi's regime, they will also face pressure from Libyans to safeguard the country's resources and its sovereignty. His brand of ultra-nationalism does carry weight in Libya, and while feelings towards the West have certainly warmed in many quarters, suspicion of overseas interference has deepened in others.

  With the benefit of hindsig
ht in 2011, some observers argued that the US and British initiative to bring Gaddafi in from the cold in the 2000s was a terrible mistake. But under the circumstances of those times, reintegrating Libya was probably the best approach to a diplomatic quandary, especially if Iraq, Afghanistan or North Korea were the alternative ways of dealing with governments they considered to be problematic. There was enough evidence to indicate that the regime was not what it used to be, and that there were splits within it that suggested Saif al-Islam might take the country, very slowly, in a new direction. But reintegrating Libya politically did not necessarily have to include major defence deals with the Gaddafi government, which the same Western powers who turned on him in early 2011 were pursuing only months earlier.

  Gaddafi was a man from a different era – and sometimes, it seemed, a different planet. His incomplete and unpredictable ideological shifts were made not in response to popular pressure or organized political opposition, but rather to ensure his survival by moving with the times. Gaddafi outlived, and gave up on, both the pan-Arab nationalism that inspired him to seize power in 1969 and the quasi-socialist ideology that lost much of its raison d'être after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. He left no ideological legacy to help shape or guide Libyan politics, and there were few armed forces or strong, independent government institutions of the kind that helped to stabilize Tunisia and Egypt after their own leaders were toppled.

  That legacy made Libya's transitional timetable even more ambitious, especially for a country with no recent experience of organizing elections. A first round of voting scheduled for summer 2012 aims to form an assembly that will draft a new constitution in just two months. This is a short deadline for such a sensitive document, and one which will determine crucial issues such as the role of Islam, the political structures of the new Libya and the system of elections.

  Delays seem inevitable, and even when a permanent government is elected it may be difficult to remove interim ministers – particularly those who have lots of armed supporters – and replace them with permanent ones. That test of whether democratic legitimacy trumps revolutionary legitimacy will be central to whether Libya really has moved on from Gaddafi. This process may take decades, and it may be hijacked by coups or civil war. Of all the countries reshaped by the Arab Spring, Libya is in the most fragile state. But another external intervention will not happen, and if the country does spin into violence or give rise to a new dictatorship, then no one will come to its rescue.

  Dangers lurk at every corner. What Libya must avoid at all costs is the kind of splintering that Yemen, another country with freely circulating weapons and powerful localism, underwent in 2011.

  CHAPTER 8

  Disintegrating Yemen

  He who fills our hands with coins is our Sultan.

  – Yemeni saying

  The civilian and military mingle almost seamlessly in Yemen, a country where open conflict never lurked far beneath the surface before 2011, erupted during it, and will persist long afterwards. At Sana'a International Airport, whose terminal looks and feels more like a bus station than the international gateway for a capital city, passenger aircraft take off and land from the same runway as Soviet-era Mig–29s whose parachutes puff up as they touch down. The curved jambiya dagger that Yemeni men, young and old, tuck into their belts are not just for decoration; they are kept sharp. Outside the cities, in the north of the country, it was not so rare to see men carrying AK47s slung over their backs, despite government efforts to stop guns being so openly carried in public. Yemen is reckoned to be the world's most heavily armed country after the United States – although it might well have lost ground to Libya after 2011.1

  More than a century's worth of conflict is commemorated in often uncompromising detail in the National War Museum in central Sana'a. Outside the front entrance near Tahrir Square – renamed Taghyeer, or Change, Square by the demonstrators who gathered there in 2011 – are several Ottoman-era cannons, the husk of a torpedo and what looks like a very early version of a tank. Inside, blurry black-and-white photos from the first half of the twentieth century show a series of grim executions. Parked in an interior courtyard at the back of the building is a purple limousine which, according to the endearingly misspelled sign next to it, was an ‘Armour Cadillac American cr used by the forst president after revolution’. An old fighter jet stood redundant nearby, its tail fin still adorned with the North Yemen flag in a reminder of the period between 1967 and 1990 when the country was split into two, and which it may be once more in the future.2

  Given this volatile heritage, it was somewhat surprising that Ali Abdullah Saleh, who became president of North Yemen in 1978 after his predecessor was assassinated, had not just managed to stay in office for more than three decades, but had actually remained alive for that long. Many had thought his political career was over in June 2011, after a rocket attack left him severely burned and temporarily exiled him to Saudi Arabia for medical treatment. But the diminutive, moustachioed Saleh was nothing if not a survivor. His return in September would add fresh drama to a complex and often tragic tale in which the Arab Spring had penned only the latest chapter.

  If the removal of authoritarian leaders in Libya, Egypt or Tunisia unleashed battles that had been festering for decades, then those battles were bursting violently above the surface in Yemen long before 2011. A sustained uprising in the north-west, a resurgent separatist movement in the south, an increasingly ambitious Al-Qaeda franchise, a looming succession crisis, myriad tribal rivalries and persistent deadlock over constitutional reform were already hammering cracks in a brittle national unity. Add a collapsing economy, dwindling oil and water resources, rampant demographic growth and the worst living standards in the Arabic-speaking world, and the picture gets even bleaker.

  Yemen has long been Arabia's anomaly. It is the only country on the peninsula to hold meaningful elections, however dysfunctional they might be, and the only one to permit political parties. Its heritage, culture and concept as a specific geographical place date back much further than those of its arriviste Arabian neighbours. ‘When Yemen was civilization, the House of Saud was still a tent,’ was how one observer put it.3 But Arabia Felix is less happy now than it was in the first century after Christ, when Pliny the Elder described it as the richest land in the world. Behind the facade of democratic institutions, political parties and elections lies a complex system of tribal, religious and regional affiliations that have long prevented the emergence of a strong state. Managing them is what Saleh once likened to ‘dancing on the heads of snakes’ – although some would say he was the biggest snake of them all.

  Tens of thousands of young Yemenis marched and occupied the streets of the country's largest cities in 2011, inspired by events in Tunisia and Egypt, to demand a wholesale overhaul of their own political system. For a brief moment, they were joined together with other groups to share what seemed to be a vision of a unified, democratic country that involved neither their long-standing president nor the system he oversaw. They were tired of being neglected, not only by a regime bent on extending its own longevity, but also by international powers that seemed to interact with Yemen only in terms of their own interests.

  But that moment proved to be fleeting. Those seeking to achieve what their counterparts had managed in Tunisia were facing a hopeless task in a country that shared few traits with the birthplace of the Arab Spring. They would soon be figuratively and literally caught up in the crossfire of conflicts being waged between more powerful forces that tipped Yemen over an edge on which it had long been teetering. Clawing its way out will not be easy.

  Divided, not Conquered

  As remarkable as Saleh's ability to cling to power over the years was Yemen's ability to hold together in the two decades following the 1990 unification that rejoined north and south. Understanding the many different fractures that dislocated the country in 2011 requires going back to their roots. Yemen is a place that has always existed more as a concept than as a
state. Its forbidding but beautiful landscapes, its mountains and deserts, highlands and lowlands, isolated valleys and remote plains had long thwarted the attempts of national or foreign powers to extend their control over tribal fiefdoms that fiercely defended themselves against outside parties they saw as suspicious and ephemeral interlopers.

  Yemeni civilization can be traced back to antiquity, but much of its twentieth-century history – and perhaps its immediate future – was characterized by the divide that split the country into two very different states. This divide was nothing new. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, the British had established themselves in the strategic deepwater port of Aden, signing loose agreements with tribal sheikhs throughout the south but never really trying to impinge on their local autonomy. The more populous north-west had lived under a religious Imamate that until the First World War had vied with the Ottomans for the control of territory. A succession crisis in 1962 triggered a bloody civil war that drew in Gamal Abdel Nasser's Egypt on one side, and Saudi Arabia and Britain on the other. The Egypt-backed military regime emerged victorious, giving birth to the Yemen Arab Republic (YAR), with its capital in the highland town of Sana'a.

  Britain's 1967 withdrawal from Aden led to the creation of the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY) in the south, a distinctly odd entity that was the only self-declared Marxist state in the Arabic-speaking world, marrying the unlikely bedfellows of urban socialism and rural tribalism. Troubled by internal conflict throughout its short history, the PDRY lost its financial and ideological raison d'être with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, and merged with Saleh's north. But many south Yemenis, as 2011 would show, had never come to terms with unification.

  Other tectonic plates were also grinding against each other. Since 2004, Saleh's military had battled at least six rounds of rebellion in the mountainous north-west province of Sa'ada, which shares a long and porous border with Saudi Arabia. This was a many-layered conflict that spanned religious, tribal and political issues, but at its heart was a local Zaydi community that felt economically marginalized and vulnerable to political and religious interference from Sana'a and further afield.