Years after the fall of Gaddafi, Libya remains in the grip of foreign powers

Abdul Hakim Belhaj was doing very well. The former rebel commander who British intelligence had once helped deliver to the Gaddafi regime through a secret rendition was riding high in the polls in Libya’s first post-revolution election in 2012.

But there were also deep reservations among many about who exactly controlled Belhaj. In Benghazi, the birthplace of the uprising against the regime, a group of students assured me that he was so much in Qatar’s pocket that even his campaign colours were the same as those of Qatar Airways.

There was, in fact, a definite difference on shades. But the young men and women were convinced that they had seen the true colours of the Islamists, and they were determined to resist them gaining power (although in recent years Belhaj has played down any link to Qatar). The fracture lines of Libya, the supposed brave new land, embarking on a new future after four decades of dictatorship, were being drawn.

A year earlier I had seen the bodies of Muammar Gaddafi and his son Mutassim lying in a meat warehouse in Misrata. The eyes were shut in seeming repose, but the shrouds of white cloth thrown over them did not hide the wounds inflicted. A queue of people, young and old, men and women, families with babies, shuffled along the room, staring down at the corpses, whispering among themselves.

This was the end of the man who had ruled Libya for 42 years at the end of what was, at the time, the most violent revolution of the Arab Spring. He and his son had been captured, tortured and killed as they tried to escape from their last place of hiding, the elder Gaddafi’s home town of Sirte.

Firuz al-Maghri, a 55-year-old schoolteacher, shook his head as he recalled a brother and a cousin who had died in Tripoli’s Abu Salim prison, a place of fear and despair. “Twelve hundred prisoners were murdered there,” he reflected.”It is difficult for outsiders to understand, but Gaddafi was responsible for so many lives lost, families who never found out what happened to those who disappeared.”

There was morbid fascination, a sense of celebration, but also unease among those present about the future.

Maghri looked forward to a stable and democratic future for his country, but both and his friend Abdurahim Mohammed, whose uncle was shot dead in Abu Salim, were also apprehensive. “We have the great curse of having oil, foreign countries will want it, try to interfered, we have to stay strong,” said Abdurahim.

A lot, but not all, the travails of Libya since the fall of the regime is due to oil. But most of what has happened is due to foreign powers who are now heavily involved in the civil war, arming and bankrolling rival military factions.

The drive to end the violence, so far futile, is also something concentrated outside the country. In the latest attempt, the UN Security Council passed a resolution this week on a plan for ceasefire without preconditions. It was adopted by 14 votes to nil, with Russia abstaining.

An international conference on Berlin last month, followed by talks in Geneva and Cairo between the two rival sides – United Nations-backed Government of National Accord (GNA) under Fayez al-Sarraj and the self-styled Libyan National Army (LNA) led by Gen Khalifa Haftar – has made very limited progress. Haftar will not even give landing rights for UN staff in the territories he controls.

The main point in the UN resolution is the need for a strict arms embargo. There is, in fact, one in place already. But it is so widely flouted as to be meaningless. Plans for a European Union naval mission to intercept weapons shipments cannot be agreed partly because some of the member states have their own Libya agendas.

Italy and France continue to back rival sides, respectively the Serraj government and Haftar. There have been claims that French Special Forces have been helping the LNA. The GNA say the evidence of this like the discovery of Javelin anti-tank missiles with French markings discovered when its forces recaptured Tripoli suburb: Paris has strongly denied the claim.

Foreign forces, some fresh from other conflicts, now abound in Libya. Turkey, backing the Serraj government, has sent fighters from Sunni militias it controls in Syria. It has also supplied Bayraktar drones, produced by Baykar Insansiz Hava Araci Sistemleri, a company owned by the family of a son-in-law of president Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Drones have become a standard form of aerial warfare in the conflict. Haftar’s forces have been provided with Chinese made Wing Loong drones paid for, it is claimed, by the UAE. Emirati and Egyptian warplanes have carried out military strikes on behalf of the general.

There is significant backing for Haftar from Moscow. Libyan Dinars are being printed in Russia for the Field Marshal – something especially important as many of his “victories” have been obtained through paying off tribal leaders.

There are Russian boots on the ground from the security company Wagner Group, the Kremlin’s private army which has been deployed in a swathe of countries from Venezuela to the Central African Republic.

More than a hundred members of Wagner, owned by Yevgeny Prigozhin, who has become known as “Putin’s chef” for his lucrative government catering contracts, are said to have arrived at the frontline end of last year to help on a stalled offensive against Tripoli by Haftar on Tripoli.

Meduza, a Russian investigative website, has reported that 35 Wagner contractors were killed in an airstrike. Some of the dead men, it was claimed, had previously fought in the Ukraine conflict.

But the Russians are also, it seems, hedging their bets somewhat on Libya. Haftar is not the only player they are are backing.

Moscow has been quietly promoting Saif al-Gaddafi, Col Gaddafi’s son and one-time heir apparent who has been trying to establish his own power base after being released from jail in the town of Zintan. It remains to be seen whether he has a realistic chance of success, but I have found in visits to the country since the war that a certain amount of nostalgia for the stability of the regime years.

The Wagner Group, according to leaked documents, presented Saif al-Gaddafi last summer with a proposal for strategy. The company has restarted Jamahiriya TV, a channel which was used to disseminate Gaddafi senior’s view of the world, and had moved to Cairo from where it had been broadcasting intermittently.

Wagner also set up a dozen Facebook groups promoting both Saif al-Gaddafi and Haftar, using some of the methods employed by the Internet Research Agency (which is linked to Prigozhin) in the 2016 US election. The election in which, it has been alleged, Donald Trump was the Muscovian candidate for the presidency.

Then there is, of course, oil.

Libya was once Africa’s third largest producer with an output of 1.6 million barrels per day (bpd). Following the revolution this slumped to just 150,000 bpd by the middle of 2014, but there has since been a recovery to around 1.1 million bpd.

Most of the oil facilities in the east of the country, where they are most concentrated, are now in the hands of Haftar and this year his forces have also taken control of the major oilfields in the south.

The Russian companies Tatneft, Gazprom, and Rosneft are said to be examining oil contracts. But they are not the only foreign concerns interested. Italy’s Eni and Total of France are engaged in joint ventures with the National Oil Corporation (NOC) based in Tripoli.

At the start of the uprising against Gaddafi we used to see posters in Benghazi proclaiming: “No foreign intervention, Libyans can do it alone.”

It became clear soon that they could not in fact do it alone. The eventual defeat of the regime was brought about by months of Nato bombing. Nine years on, at the start of a new decade, Libya sadly remains in the grip of foreign hands more than ever.