The West failed to finish the job in 2011; now it must deal with the problem as soon as possible, writes Peter Fabricius.
Libya is still struggling to put itself together again after the toppling of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 splintered the country.
Two separate Libyan governments eventually emerged from the civil war, the General National Congress (GNC) in the national capital Tripoli and the House of Representatives (HoR) government in the eastern coastal city of Tobruk.
But vast territory between them remained beyond the control of either, run instead by independent militias and, more recently, the Islamic State, which now occupies Gaddafi’s birthplace Sirte, just east of Tripoli and a long stretch of coast beyond it.
The arrival of IS appeared to grab the attention of the international community and so last December the UN brokered the new, optimistically-named Government of National Accord (GNA) under Fayez al-Sarraj, to try to unify the two rival governments and the country so it could fight the jihadist menace.
The GNA now has the backing of almost all countries.
But, after failing to win the crucial full support of either Tripoli or Tobruk, Sarraj had to be brought to Tripoli by foreign naval escort in March and ensconced in a naval dockyard because the GNC wouldn’t let him into the city itself.
It was a bold gambit by Sarraj and it seems to have paid off in that he has begun to make some progress as he has begun to broaden his remit, taking over key institutions such as the central bank and the National Oil Corporation.
But the HoR in Tobruk remains opposed.
Yesterday the international community convened a conference in Vienna, co-chaired by US Secretary of State John Kerry and his Italian counterpart Paulo Gentiloni and attended by other European and Middle Eastern foreign ministers to seek ways of bolstering Sarraj and the GNA.
That would help weld the rival factions into a single military Libyan force able both to defeat Islamic State (IS) - and also establish some sort of control over the flow of refugees from the now ungoverned coast to Italy.
Before Sarraj landed in Tripoli in March, Italy and other Western powers were hoping to persuade him to invite a foreign military force to go in and take on IS.
That would have been a rather thin pretext to avoid another unilateral Western intervention like the disastrous Nato-led aerial bombardment which helped rebels oust Gaddafi in 2011 but left a power vacuum and chaos in its wake.
Sarraj wouldn’t go along with this plan. He no doubt feared that would discredit him among Libyans as a stooge of the West.
That would prevent him from winning over the factions and militias he needed to unify the country so Libyans could defeat IS themselves
But Sarraj does want foreign assistance in arms, training and intelligence to do the job and was expected to formally request them at yesterday’s meeting.
This, though, would require the partial lifting of the UN arms embargo on Libya and the international community is divided over the wisdom of that.
Martin Kobler, the UN special envoy to Libya who helped broker the formation of the GNA (and whose last job was heading the UN’s peacekeeping force in the Democratic Republic of Congo), is among those who believe the GNA needs the latest weapons to defeat IS.
Others fear that pouring yet more arms into a country already awash with them would just aggravate the chronic insecurity.
The international community also wants access for its navies to Libya’s coastal waters to try to stop people traffickers putting refugees into unseaworthy boats to sail to Europe.
The issue of military support for the GNA and especially any decision to lift the arms embargo is certainly very tricky.
Mattia Toaldo, a Libya expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations, was quoted in The Guardian as advising against it.
“Europeans now have what they asked for, namely a unity government ruling from the capital,” he said.
“They should take care not to burden it with unrealistic demands, from ending the migrant crisis to defeating IS. Instead, the West should work to strengthen the government’s political control over the country.”
It’s certainly true that Sarraj’s priority must be to win more political support. But if he has requested military support, presumably he is ready to accept the burden of tackling IS.
And, as far as the immigrants are concerned, if the international community only wants access to Libya’s waters to tackle human traffickers, that also should not be too much of a burden for Sarraj and the GNA to bear.
After the unintended consequences of the 2011 Nato intervention, there is an understandable wariness about any sort of foreign military involvement in Libya.
Sarraj was no doubt wise to refuse a full-scale Western military intervention now to defeat IS. But let us not forget that a large part of failure of the international community in 2011 was that, having gone in, it failed to stay on to finish the job.
That is what it has to do now.
The decision whether or not to intervene now, and to what degree, has to be taken in the light of 2016 circumstances, not those of 2011.
Pretoria News