Maria Vidiassova

Libya. Where does the country of 140 tribes go?

The present book contains a number of sketches of Libya’s history from the antique era to its conquest by the Ottoman Empire and then by Italy. The author describes in detail different periods of Libya’s development as an independent state. However, the main focus of the book is the Libyan civil war, which blasted in 2011, and the issue of the West Europe’s role in this interminable war.

From the author’s point of view, the Libyan civil war and the calamities in all countries of the so-called Arab Spring were produced by the internal and also external factors. There is no reason to deplore a “golden age” of Gaddafi’s rule which was totalitarian, severe and unhuman. But the military intervention of NATO in Libya served as a stimulant to the revival of old evils within the local social framework, such as tribalism and regionalism. Thus, the civil war there became an arena for disguise or open tribal antagonisms. One of the worst effects of this war is the blossom of slave trade which has embodied half of Africa, while mass immigration of Africans to Europe via Libya stimulates racism and neofascism there. Many countries are involved in the rise of the latter, including France, Holland and Italy, the ex-metropole of Libya.

By the way, media’s coverage and interpretation of Libya’s events abroad are very different; the author avoids analyzing all viewpoints, especially the laymen’s ones, but gives several examples. Attention is paid to the analysis of the French expresident Sarkozy’s active role in the creation of the Western military coalition against Gaddafi. This is a real detective story with many actors and middle men.

No doubt, the current development of Libyan crisis is more important now. According to the author’s understanding, there are no hopes for its rapid solution, mostly because of the inner polarization of the Libyan society and its ethnical disunity. Those features have gone deeper during the civil war. Above all it has contributed to the disunity of the entire Arab World, which is symbolized by a wall along the frontier between Libya and Tunisia, built by the latter.

It is widely known, that the main line of division in Libya lies between Tripolitania and Cyrenaica. And this line represents an invisible, though strong wall on the way to the national reconciliation – a process which was initiated by the UN in 2015 and resulted in conventions, concluded in the Moroccan town Skhirat. The UN envoys’ efforts to promote national accord in Libya on the base of those conventions are honorable, but they encounter many dif-Acuities. The greatest among them is proliferation of multiple terrorist groups in Libya, local, foreign or mixed by their roots. Every one of them tries to win or privatize some oil field or oil terminal, some city, village or oasis, some strategic area etc. The warfare in Libya is led mostly by brigades under command of warlords of either tribal or Islamist origin.

Something similar to a regular army, the “Libyan national army” (LNA), has been created in Cyrenaica and headed by the field marshal Khalifa Haftar, ex-colonel of Gaddafi’s military establishment. But as soon as the infor-mation about his presumable death or grave illness appeared, LNA began to crack down due to the inner struggle for power, having a tribal “color”.

The civil powers of Libya are evidently weak, corrupt and depend on those famous brigades or militias who are the real “kings” of the country.