Exit the Colonel (31 page)

The French debriefed Mismari in the course of an asylum application and were apparently ready to send him back to Libya, when they changed their minds. According to one source, in addition to a furious response to France and Sarkozy personally, Gaddafi immediately confiscated the passports of other senior officials who he thought might be flight risks.
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There have been allegations that Mismari had been carrying information about unrest in Benghazi and that he would help the French pave the way for French action against Libya once the Arab Spring was under way.
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It seems highly unlikely that Mismari had foreseen the Arab Spring, but the timing of his defection reflects the heightened level of turbulence and concern within Gaddafi's inner circles prior to the new year.

As an indication of how seriously Gaddafi took Mismari's defection, he sent a host of people—including Mu'tassim—to convince him to return, as late as February 5, to no avail.
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Abdelrahman Shalgam, in his 559-page postrevolutionary treatise on the “people around Gaddafi,” said that he met with Gaddafi about the same time and that the two discussed deteriorating morale within the Libyan leadership. Gaddafi was “intensely bitter” about increasing ridicule heaped upon Prime Minister Baghdadi Ali Mahmoudi and what he sensed was similar chatter about the incompetence of his sons.
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What was the Western policy establishment thinking about all this? Had some agencies started to plan actively for contingencies, predicated upon further dramatic declines in Libya's orientation or Gaddafi's mental state? It was apparently known (to the Italians, at least) that Gaddafi had been seeing an Italian psychiatrist (there are no other public reports that Gaddafi had ever seen a Western doctor for mood disorders). If so, the assumption is that this doctor
was passing information on Gaddafi's condition to the West. Alexander Najjar, in his 2011 book
Anatomy of a Tyrant
, speculated that Nouri Al Mismari provided French authorities with a trove of information on Gaddafi, which may have alerted the French and their Western allies to “something” coming, in time for the French to send aid to the “future insurgents.”
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Given a lengthy history of the kinds of actions Gaddafi was capable of executing when he was down or felt affronted, some in Washington (and other European capitals) may have begun to conclude that Gaddafi might soon become a serious problem. While there is a big leap between these observations and the suggestion that the West somehow divined or was involved in what was about to transpire in Libya, the coincidence is rather striking. And it is reminiscent of the kinds of discussions the British had in the years after Gaddafi's coup about his potential to be become a liability that should be addressed.

After pulling all the above threads together—difficult to do at the time—the events that followed seem somehow far less out of the blue. By the same token, they strongly underscore the argument that the Libya conflagration contained significant elements that were independent of the Arab Spring. We have no idea, of course, what would have happened had neighboring Tunisia and Egypt not ejected their leaders in popular uprisings during the following months. At the same time, contrary to blasé security assessments from leading security companies, Libya was not stable; foreign commercial interests looked increasingly at risk; US-Libya relations were effectively frozen; and the principal reformists appeared to have been neutralized, at least for the time being.

As January 2011 came and went, and a Libyan version of the Arab Spring appeared ever more likely, Washington-based policymakers, steeped in the Iraq experience, began to wonder aloud about the risk of a no-holds-barred civil war, stoked by tribal, regional, and extremist-ideological schisms. Implicitly and explicitly, these would be the three dysfunctions to watch. Even if subsequent events appeared to substantiate these fears in different ways, it is worth elaborating on the situation.

With respect to tribal influence, Libya in 2011 was certainly not Libya of 1950 or 1960, an era when tribal affiliations were still quite strong. In the
intervening years, Gaddafi had done much to attenuate tribal affiliations on a national scale, in part by creating new administrative districts that cut across tribal lines. As he did this, however, he increased patronage links to those tribes closest to his own clan (the Gaddafa), including Warfalla, the Megaraha, and the Mujraba, from among whose ranks came key associates Abdelsalam Al Jelloud (Megaraha), Abdullah Senussi (Megaraha), and Abu Bakr Younes (Mujraba). Mahmoud Jibril, head of the former Libyan Economic Development Board and future rebel prime minister, was a member of the favored Warfalla tribe, and his studies in the US were alleged to have been linked to tribal privilege. Despite the fact that members of all of these tribes defected to the rebel side in 2011, there remained large numbers who would not abandon their loyalty to Gaddafi. Each tribe tended to provide services to Gaddafi in professional clusters; thus the Warfalla were typically heavily represented in Gaddafi's security force, and the Megaraha more in senior finance and commercial positions.
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Despite Gaddafi's half-hearted attempts to settle the Bedouin in townships outside the cities, the exodus from the rural regions to the main cities of Benghazi and Tripoli sped up under Gaddafi, as he had never built sufficient infrastructure or jobs to keep people in rural areas. There was also large-scale migration from Benghazi to Tripoli in the 1980s and 1990s, as the economic opportunities were predominantly in the well-funded West. While the east-west cultural divide persisted, and Benghaziites complained frequently of discrimination in Tripoli based in part on their accents, there was a fair amount of intermarriage, which further attenuated linkage to place and tribe.

One prominent Arab columnist wrote:

Libyan political commentators cited a poll taken in the lead-up to the revolution, which demonstrated that tribalism, while important, was not all important: 90 percent of one thousand male respondents felt an “attachment” to their tribe,
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with 45 percent describing this as a “very strong” link;
45 percent, an active/present connection; and 15 percent identifying themselves as more or less indifferent to both tribal connections and context. According to a survey conducted in six districts in eastern Libya in the fall of 2011 (i.e., after the revolution), only 1 percent of more than fourteen hundred respondents indicated “membership in tribe”' as their principal affiliation.
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In a way, all of this was splitting hairs; much the same could have been and was said about Iraq pre-2003. Tribalism is, to use a favorite word of Gaddafi, “latent,” and however much it has been attenuated by time, mixing, and so on, it flares up under conditions of uncertainty as a social security net of last resort. What Libya did
not
have was the complicating factor of Shi'a–Sunni divisions, which rent post-Saddam Iraq and were an obvious factor in Bahrain's Arab Spring. The relevance of tribalism to the postrevolutionary Libya was tied to the magnitude and duration of the disruption; in other words, the more chaos Libya endured in transition from Gaddafi to whatever came next, the more likely tribalism, regionalism, and religious extremism would emerge as problems.

The existence of separate regional identities in a country like Libya is far from surprising. As we have seen, the vast majority of the population is concentrated in the west around Tripoli and in the east around Benghazi. Historically, these regions and cities evolved somewhat differently; the tribal affiliations and political traditions were somewhat different. Members of each region are readily recognizable to the others by both accent or dialect and often appearance. For the same factors described—migration, economic dislocation, increased travel, and intermarriage—the almost absolute link between tribe and region had been very much weakened from the 1960s to the present, which was not to say that regional prejudices do not continue to exist. On the other hand, the main cause of regional discord (the east-west split) had less to do with these factors directly than to the escalating tension between the east and the Gaddafi family, which was linked to feelings of mutual distrust and a historic restiveness, to the tradition of opposition to the Italians, and even to King Idris. The easterners, one might say, were naturally disinclined to submit to outside authority. As the Islamist-flavored opposition grew and became increasingly effective, Gaddafi pursued a policy of collective punishment, depriving Benghazi—a commercial hub at various times in Libyan history—of its dynamism and even basic infrastructure.

Of course, Gaddafi's policies of collective punishment created new animosities, also regionally centered. Unemployment was much higher in the east than in the west, a situation exacerbated by a large number of Egyptian expatriate workers, mainly in the East (by various estimates, at any given time one sixth of the people in Benghazi were Egyptians in the service and transit trades). Benghazi's port, once the country's lifeline to the outside world, had been operating far below capacity for decades, and there were few tourist facilities. Symbolic was Benghazi's central, picturesque lagoon, which had been sealed off, its waters fed by effluent from an abattoir, producing a noxious stench that literally sucked the oxygen from the center of the city.

During the makeover period, the Gaddafis had said much about the improving conditions in Benghazi as a way to soften the east-west divide. The 2002
Libya Development Report
cites Benghazi as one of the most prosperous regions in Libya. From 2009 to 2010, there had indeed been some improvements—the effluent to the central lake had been cut off. The twelve-hundred-bed Benghazi medical center, mothballed for well over a decade, opened in 2009, albeit at one-sixth capacity. Low-income, low-standard housing developments constructed by Turkish firms were going up, under the Saif Al Islam reformist banner. Even so, Benghazi residents saw it as an attempt to effectively place all potential regime opponents in places where they could be controlled.

Even though Tripoli was the seat of government, many innovative ideas and people—as witnessed in the provenance of those who participated in the National Economic Strategy sessions—came from Benghazi, which, like Derna and other centers in the east, was known as the “place where people (actually) read.” While Bernard-Henri Lévy could be forgiven for under-appreciating the intellectual history of Benghazi, he misspoke when he said: “I noted, during the passage, and once more, that only art, and more particularly, the art of letters, could give life to stone and that a town without writers, however beautiful it might be—and God knows Benghazi is beautiful—will never know other than a second-rank existence.”
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As with Western notions of the strength and relevance of tribal affiliations in modern-day Libya, there is some support for the idea that eastern Libya had become a bastion for extreme ideologies. Anyone who had studied Libyan opposition groups knew that the most effective elements were both Islamic (as opposed to secular) and based in the east. Further, these groups, the LIFG first and foremost, had been fortified by the experiences some of its members
had had as fighters in Afghanistan and Iraq. A cache of documents discovered by US forces on computers at a safe house along the Iraqi border with Syria in 2007, known as the “Sinjar records,” offered a rare demographic snapshot of 595 foreign fighters in Iraq. The shocking find in the documents was the relatively high percentage of individuals that were Saudi and Libyan nationals.
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The absolute numbers were not as important as the per capita representation: 52 of the sample of 595 records (those that included nationalities) came originally from the Libyan town of Derna, with a population of 80,000.
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Some speculated their impetus might have been the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group's (LIFG's) “increasingly cooperative relationship with Al Qaeda.”
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The Sinjar records were publicized in a 2007
Newsweek
article entitled, “The Martyr Factory: Why One Libyan Town Became a Pipeline for Suicide Bombers in Iraq.”
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Wikileaks drew attention again to the Sinjar records in 2010 by publishing a June 2008 US Embassy-Tripoli cable, erroneously quoted describing Derna as a “wellspring of Islamic terrorism.”
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The cable did not offer a direct assessment of the situation in Derna by embassy personnel, but rather recounts the assessment of an unidentified American-Libyan national. Among the more interesting reported observations was the notion that local religious leaders “encourage jihad” through coded messages during Friday prayers.
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The provocative title of the
Newsweek
article notwithstanding, the author noted that he found no evidence in the Dernawi population of any “blind commitment to some overarching, jihadist ideology,” but that “personal factors like psychological trauma, sibling rivalry and sexual longing” were prevalent. Reports issued by a few Western reporters who showed up in Derna after late February 2011 further supported previous (albeit inconclusive) onsite assessments. A Reuters correspondent reported on the local residents' efforts to counter the widespread external impression that Derna was somehow linked to Al Qaeda: