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The burning shores: inside the battle for the new Libya

2018; Oxford University Press; Volume: 94; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/ia/iiy149

1468-2346

Ronald Bruce St John,

Global Political and Social Dynamics

The 17 February Revolution which ended the 42-year rule of the Gaddafi regime spawned a welcome new generation of Libyan specialists, and Frederic Wehrey is one of the best of them. He first visited Libya in 2009 as a military officer working at the United States Embassy and, after the revolution ended, he travelled widely throughout the country. Over time, he has developed an unparalleled range of contacts inside and outside Libya. With a solid grounding in the country's history, Wehrey's analysis of contemporary socio-economic and political events in Libya has an authoritative freshness that few could replicate. Wehrey sets out to ‘find the turning points and missteps that caused the splintering of Libya’ which he believes was ‘not preordained after the fall of Qadhafi’ (pp. 5–6). However, the murder in July 2011 of Major General Abd Al Fattah Younis, a confidant of Prime Minister Muammar Gaddafi turned rebel, was one such turning-point, as it exposed early on the conflict between those who wanted to preserve or reform the old order and those who wanted to replace it. The passage in May 2013 of the political isolation law, which prohibited anyone formally tied to the Gaddafi regime from holding government office for ten years, was another such milestone, in that it reduced public confidence in the General National Congress (GNC)—the first elected parliament in decades—and compromised the more liberal, secular trend represented by the National Forces Alliance (NFA). The subsequent failure of the Muslim Brotherhood and its Islamist allies in the GNC to showcase a commitment to consensus-building and pluralistic politics accelerated the growing polarization of the body politic. It also encouraged outside meddling in Libyan affairs by several states—notably Egypt, Turkey, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. One year later, the launch of Operation Dignity in May 2014, countered by the creation of Libya Dawn in July 2014, split the country into two broad but highly pluralistic factions. Yet another turning-point occurred in December 2015 when UN-brokered talks between the Dignity and Dawn factions led to the signing of the Libyan Political Agreement in Skhirat, Morocco. Widely viewed as something imposed from the outside, the agreement was weighed down from the start by flaws in its concept, creation and execution.