NATO's Failure in Libya: Lessons for Africa

UN Security Council Resolution 1973 and the Responsibility to Protect

35 Horace Campbell UN Security Council Resolution 1973 and the Responsibility to Protect In Libya under Gaddafi, political opposition took a religious form and one of the more well-known opposition organisations was the LIFG.77 This organisation included members who had aligned with the US to fight against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Some of its functionaries were named as beneficiaries of Saudi funds in North Africa and the Middle East. According to George Tenet, former head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), ‘one of the most immediate threats [to U.S. security] is from smaller international Sunni extremist groups that have benefited from al-Qaida links. They include ... the LIFG’.78 Long before the US had identified violent Islamist extremists, Gaddafi had been among the first leaders to warn of the dangers of violent extremism. In 1996, Libya became the first government to place Osama bin Laden on Interpol’s Wanted List.79 In 1995, the LIFG launched a jihad against Gaddafi’s regime and attempted to escalate their activities into a ‘pre-revolutionary situation’.80 With the backdrop of the years of bloodshed in neighbouring Algeria, the people of Libya had no appetite for armed rebellions with the cycle of bombings and state repression. The most significant LIFG attack was a 1996 attempt to assassinate Gaddafi. LIFG members, led by Wadi al-Shateh, threw a bomb underneath his motorcade. The group also staged guerrilla-style attacks against government security forces from its mountain bases. The response of the regime to these forms of armed opposition deepened the alienation of the regime from the peoples in the East. An effort at administrative reorganisation of the country in 1998 did not repair the weaknesses of Libya’s governance structures. After 1998, the regime embarked on the ‘liberalisation of the economy’ and policies of decentralisation, but there was never any question that the inner circles of the Gaddafi family would loosen their monopoly over the use of force. One of the most profound weaknesses of the regime – the general lack of coherence of Libya’s armed forces – raised its head. This was because the 36 Africa Institute of South Africa NATO’s failure in Libya: Lessons for Africa regime was apprehensive about the ‘collaboration between Islamist rebels and the security forces’.81 After September 11, 2001 Gaddafi ingratiated himself with the West and, in his ‘conversion’, went overboard to cooperate with Western intelligence organisations to shut down the Islamists. The LIFG was banned worldwide (as an affiliate of al-Qaeda) by the UN 1267 Committee and was listed at the Foreign Terrorist Organizations. After the NATO intervention in Libya, British newspapers carried extensive details on the level of collaboration between Gaddafi and British and US intelligence services. According to The Guardian, Papers discovered in Tripoli apparently show that MI6 gave Muammar Gaddafi’s security service information on Libyan dissidents living in the UK. They also contain communications between British and Libyan security ahead of thenprime minister Tony Blair’s desert tent meeting with Gaddafi in 2004. Britain is said to have helped the Libyan dictator with his speech-writing. The documents, discovered in the Tripoli offices of former head of Libyan intelligence Moussa Koussa, also show how the CIA worked with the Gaddafi regime on the rendition of terrorist suspects.82 From the Christian Science Monitor newspaper we also learnt that, Nearly 300 pages of documents, copied by Human Rights Watch (HRW) from the offices of Libya’s external security service, provide unprecedented detail about how the CIA and Britain’s MI6 worked closely to bring Libya ‘on side’ and turn a brutal regime from foe into friend after Mr. Qaddafi in 2003 vowed to give up weapons of mass destruction, end support of militant groups, and take on Al Qaeda. Part of that effort was forcibly returning to Libya key opponents of the regime – including the Libyan who today commands anti-Qaddafi forces in Tripoli – despite knowing the conditions those suspects would face.83 The details of the exchanges between the Libyan government and the US and British intelligence services are significant because these exchanges gave the West unprecedented information on the workings of the Libyan intelligence capabilities. Gaddafi had enabled the imperial intelligence services by sharing information, financing their governments, purchasing junk equipment as weaponry and cooperating with their intelligence agencies. Most importantly, these exchanges gave the West a clear understanding of the nature of the Libyan opposition. [3.139.238.76] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 05...