NATO's Failure in Libya: Lessons for Africa

Introduction

1 Horace Campbell Introduction When the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings erupted in Africa, in the first two months of the year 2011, with the chant, ‘the people want to bring down the regime’, there was hope all over the continent that these rebellions were part of a wider African Awakening. President Ben Ali of Tunisia was forced to step down and fled to Saudi Arabia. Within a month of Ben Ali’s departure, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt was removed from power by the people, who mobilised a massive revolutionary movement in the country. Four days after the ousting of Mubarak, sections of the Libyan people rebelled in Benghazi. Within days, this uprising was militarised, with armed resistance countered by declarations from the Libyan leadership vowing to use raw state power to root out the rebellion. The first Libyan demonstrations occurred on February 15, 2011, but by February 21 there were reports that innocent civilians were in imminent danger of being massacred by the army. This information was embellished by reports of the political leadership branding the rebellious forces as ‘rats’. The United States (US), Britain and France took the lead to rush through a resolution in the United Nations (UN) Security Council, invoking the principle of the ‘responsibility to protect’. This concept of responsibility to protect had been embraced and supported by many governments in the aftermath of the genocidal episodes in Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovo. The UN Security Council Resolution 1973 of 2011 was loosely worded, with the formulation ‘all necessary measures’ tacked on to ensure wide latitude for those societies and political leaders who orchestrated the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) intervention in Libya.1 In the following nine months, the implementation of this UN resolution exposed the real objectives of the leaders of the US, France and Britain. With the Western media fuelling a propaganda campaign in the traditions of ‘manufacturing consent’, this Security Council authorisation was stretched from a clear and limited civilian protection mandate into a military campaign for regime change and the execution of the President of Libya, Muammar Gaddafi.2 When, a week after Gaddafi’s execution, Seumas Milne wrote in the UK newspaper The Guardian, ‘If the Libyan war was about saving lives, it was a catastrophic failure’, he was communicating a conclusion that had been echoed by democratic forces all over the world, and repeated by concerned 2 Africa Institute of South Africa NATO’s failure in Libya: Lessons for Africa intellectuals who had written An Open Letter to the Peoples of Africa and the World from Concerned Africans.3 The themes of NATO’s failure were repeated by Western newspapers that opined, ‘The Libya campaign, far from demonstrating NATO’s abiding strength, rather exposed its manifold, and growing, weaknesses’.4 Think tanks and opinion makers such as the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) of London and the Jamestown Foundation of the US could not but comment on the clear failure of this highly publicised mission that was presented under the rubric of ‘humanitarianism’. As a display of Western military strength and cohesion, the NATO operation was a failure and was understood to be so by the majority outside the orbit of the mainstream of the Anglo-American media.5 Writers from Asia were linking the role of the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) to the new power grab in Africa, while there was massive opposition from Africa. In studying the catastrophic failures, African intellectuals have sought to highlight the illegal actions of NATO, calling for the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate and establish if war crimes were committed in Libya. One year after the NATO forces embarked on their mission to carry out regime change in Libya, it is still pertinent to restate the principal ideas that came from Africa in the face of the present lawlessness, torture and terror campaigns of competing militias. Amnesty International, by no means an organisation unfriendly to NATO, issued a report in February 2012 detailing widespread torture in the prisons and makeshift detention facilities in Libya. This report documented savage practices which included beatings with whips, cables, metal chains and wooden sticks, electric shocks, extraction of fingernails, and rape. Militia fighters conducted these attacks brazenly, in some cases abusing prisoners in the presence of human rights advocates.6 Amnesty International has also reported the widespread persecution of innocent citizens by out-of-control militias. In January 2012, one report by a human rights group from the Middle East documented war crimes carried out...