NATO's Failure in Libya: Lessons for Africa

The Independence of Libya and the Birth of NATO

13 Horace Campbell The Independence of Libya and the Birth of NATO The history of Libya has, for thousands of years, been intertwined with the social and economic transformations of Africa, Europe and the Middle East. Sitting at the North of the continent of Africa, the peoples of the region west of the Nile Valley were engulfed in the fortunes of trade, ideas and religious expansion. Europeans along the Mediterranean coast interacted with the peoples of Libya for thousands of years, suffering major invasions from this region. Two of the more well-known forays from North Africa were the one by Hannibal and another by the Moors, who occupied the Iberian Peninsula as part of the wave of new expansions after the 7th Century. This invasion emanated from Arabia, through Egypt to Morocco, and Arabised millions of Africans from the Imazighen peoples – called Berbers.30 European scholars imposed their own concepts of hierarchy on the diverse populations of differing ethnicities that lived in the area that is now called Libya.31 The peoples who inhabit this territory were under the domination of the Ottoman Empire up to the period of the expansion of industrial Europe when it reached the monopoly stage. Present day Libya emerged out of two provinces of the Ottoman Empire – Tripolitania and Cyrenaica. The third region, called Fezzan, eluded complete occupation by the colonial powers. These provinces escaped the French occupation of Algiers in 1830 and the financial domination of France over the area of what was to become Tunisia. After the banking group, the Rothschilds, helped Britain to consolidate their ascendancy in Egypt subsequent to the building of the Suez Canal, in 1869, there was an unwritten Anglo-French convention that defined the British and Turkish spheres of influence in North Africa. The liberation struggle Like most present boundaries in Africa, Libya’s current borders were carved out in the period of the imperial partitioning of Africa by European states, when Africans lost their independence. At the infamous Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, the region that is now Libya remained under Ottoman rule. 14 Africa Institute of South Africa NATO’s failure in Libya: Lessons for Africa Turkey was allowed to maintain nominal control over this region because the dominant imperial powers did not consider Turkish power as a threat to monopoly interests in Europe. Italy, which had recently been quasi united, wanted to establish itself as a major world power in Africa but was soundly defeated by the Ethiopians at Dogali in 1887, and more decisively at Adowa in 1896. The Italians never gave up their goal of gaining colonial territory in Africa, and in 1911 invaded the area that is now called Libya. ‘By turning Cyrenaica into an armed camp, by arrests, deportations, confiscations and executions and by use of an overwhelming weight of modern military equipment, the Italian finally mastered the resistance and cornered the last, exhausted fighting bands of the Gebel Akhdar’.32 In all African societies the people instinctively rose up to oppose foreign occupation, and Libya was no exception. Libyan peoples of differing ethnic groups united to oppose Italian occupation and a consciousness about being Libyan emerged in this anti-colonial period between 1911 and 1941. There was constant guerrilla resistance against the Italians, especially after the Benito Mussolini forces acceded power in 1922 and imposed fascist administrative structures in Libya. In order to snuff out rebellion, the fascists imported large numbers of Italian settlers and developed infrastructure to coordinate colonial control. Peoples from all regions rebelled against colonial fascism, with outstanding Libyans like Umar a Mukhtar waging guerrilla war against the Italians for more than twenty years. Like the coordinated hunt for Gaddafi, close to 80 years later, Mukhtar was hunted down, captured and hanged in one of the fascist concentration camps. World War II speeded up the processes of national consciousness and political organisation among the Libyans who had been integrated into the generalised forms of anti-colonialism that was then sweeping North Africa. Britain took control of the region after the Axis forces were driven from North Africa. With their monarchical traditions, the British supported one faction of the Libyans, the Sanussis, and installed their leader as King Idris. British intellectuals such as E.E. Evans-Pritchard functioned as colonial administrators, and through their anthropological writings sought to place the cultural modelling and categorisations of ‘primitive tribal’ affiliations on Libya as on other African societies.33 The tide of nationalism had surged throughout the region in the...