The New Middle East (52 page)

Nobody seemed to be in command of the war effort. Diplomats joked to me at the time that the rebel leadership of the National Transitional Council or NTC, based in Benghazi, wanted the international community to overthrow Gaddafi for them. But the diplomats were missing the point. They weren’t on the front line, so they couldn’t see the kind of war that was being fought. The rebel fighters elsewhere in the country understood though. The east was never going to liberate the west. That simple truth revealed the tensions at the heart of Libyan society. They had existed before and during Gaddafi’s rule. They were forged in the creation of the nation state, and they foreshadow many of the problems that will dog what comes in the post-war era.

In July 2011 I hitched a lift on the
Victory
, a boat taking aid across the Mediterranean from Malta and into the beleaguered city of Misrata. The rebels there first fought the Libyan army to a standstill along Tripoli Street in the heart of the city, and then slowly pushed them out. They did it largely on their own. NATO airstrikes were of little use, because it was impossible from the air to identify accurate targets in the urban centre. The people here knew they were in a fight to the death. During the stalemate of these late spring and early summer months there was speculation that the country could stay divided for years, with the Gaddafi clan holding the west and the Benghazi rebels the east. That would have left cities like Misrata, Zawiyah and the Nafusa mountain tribes firmly in the government camp.

The outcome of the whole civil war turned around Misrata. It was the only pocket of rebellion in western Libya that Gaddafi’s troops failed to put down. His soldiers fought hard there because the Brother Leader would probably have settled for only having control of the west if that meant he could still survive the revolution. Without Misrata though he had nothing. It was politically and economically crucial. However there was a growing sense in the city that its survival was not at the top of the list of priorities for the new eastern bureaucrats in Benghazi.

The NTC was recognised early on in the revolution by the international community as the legitimate representative of the Libyan people. It also ran the country for the first ten months of the post-war era. After the war I met the man who became its prime minister, Mahmoud Jibril. He told me the NTC, as an organisation, was flawed from the start:

When the NTC was composed there were no criteria, people didn’t know each other, everyone came from a different city, they met for the first time at the NTC. We had different political orientations, different levels of education, different social backgrounds. They just met and agreed on one objective, ‘getting rid of Gaddafi’. Other than that there was no common purpose whatsoever. Our differences came out clearly when Gaddafi was gone. We discovered we don’t talk the same language. We have different perceptions of different things. Once I got angry with them at a meeting and I told them: ‘You are like passengers on a bus. You met on the bus and you have nothing in common but this bus.’

Jibril fell out with his colleagues after the war. They accused him of trying to dominate the council. But the problems Jibril says became apparent only after the conflict were clearly visible at the time to those who did the fighting in Misrata. Guns were being sent from Benghazi, a local businessman who was helping to fund the war effort told me, but they came much quicker if money changed hands. The commanders in Misrata believed the Benghazi-based rebel leadership was too busy politicking to try to help liberate them too.

That deep sense of suspicion of the eastern rebels was shared elsewhere. ‘We always tell the Benghazi rebels that they only fought for a week and then stopped,’ a young man in Tripoli told me after the war. Some fighters did travel from Benghazi to fight in other areas, but there wasn’t a flood of recruits. These deep historical regional strains had been suppressed by Gaddafi’s rule, but the war to overthrow him unleashed and exacerbated them.

For most of the civil war the fighting on the eastern front oscillated up and down the road that ran along the Gulf of Sirte between and around Ras Lanuf and the equally tiny oil refinery town of Brega. They sat on either side of the southernmost tip of the Gulf, separated by 130 kilometres of desert. Just about the only place you could find easily on a map was a fork in the road, on the outskirts of Brega, where I would watch the rebels congregate each day. They would point their pickup trucks in the general direction of the town. On the back they had mounted rocket pods that had been ripped off the side of helicopters. Then they would shout ‘Allahu Akbar’ and fire them off. And no sooner had they done so than the Libyan army would start to pound the road junction with artillery fire. And the rebels would run away.

Once, as I followed them back, an artillery round landed just metres away from our car but then failed to explode. If it had done so all of us would have been blown to pieces. Instead we watched it bounce up and spiral away into the sand dunes to the right of us. We were all running away because, unlike the Misratans, the eastern fighters never dug in to hold ground and build for an offensive. Throughout the rest of the war the eastern rebels failed to push beyond Ras Lanuf. It only fell on 23 August. On that day I was with the fighters in the west as they overran Gaddafi’s fortified Bab al-Aziziya compound in the capital Tripoli. Even at this late stage the eastern rebels didn’t win Ras Lanuf, the disintegrating army gave it up. ‘They just ran,’ said a rebel spokesman in Benghazi.
¹

The military campaign run by the eastern leadership seemed as incompetent as it was at times comical to watch. But the fighters, too, seemed to lack not only the ability, but also the will. If the rebels in the west could capture the capital, why couldn’t the eastern rebels during those five months take and hold a couple of one-horse towns in the middle of nowhere?

The fighters in the east stopped making gains exactly at the point along the coastline that had been the ancient boundary between Cyrenaica and Tripolitania, the two biggest provinces. When I used to ask why they weren’t making any movement forward the fighters would talk grandly about a ‘big push’ that would be launched in the next few days or weeks, which would sweep them down towards the Gaddafi clan’s stronghold of Sirte. But the big push never came. Throughout the war the eastern rebels made no progress whatsoever beyond the boundaries of their old province. Their Libya had been liberated. Beyond Brega they were fighting for somebody else’s turf.

The military failures of the then Benghazi-based leadership of the NTC would prove deadly in those summer months for the rebels hanging on in other parts of the country. It was something they would not forgive or forget later. It has still not been determined if this frustration was behind the mysterious assassination in July 2011 of General Abdul Fatah Younis, who had defected to the opposition and was in charge of their war effort.

During the Libyan civil war each town and city was largely left to liberate itself. That led to highly localised militias in each of those large towns or cities, which called themselves ‘brigades’. The memory of that failure sustained the brigades afterwards. They were still supported by their local communities because they were drawn from the local people. They often concluded that if the centralised leadership couldn’t be trusted to do the right thing during the war, why trust it to do so during the peace? And that meant the shape of that peace would often be in the hands of a bunch of armed and fractious militias. Sometimes, when they rubbed up against each other in the capital Tripoli, there were gun battles on the streets.

Libya’s geography meant the war was largely fought along a fraction of its landmass, the coastline that stretches along the southern Mediterranean. The political divisions that exist in Libya post-Gaddafi are a simple consequence of the physical divisions between Libya’s people. The country is huge, but most of it is desert. Even great lengths of the more fertile coastline are nothing but empty space. During the conflict it would stretch out before me for miles and then suddenly swallow the car up in a sandstorm, only to spit it out into a small patch of desert where the men were fighting and dying for a place you couldn’t find on a map.

In the days of the Ottoman Empire the eastern region of what is now Libya, the province of Cyrenaica, looked further east to neighbouring Egypt. The western region of Libya called Tripolitania looked west to Tunisia. Until recent times they had little to do with each other. The remaining area of modern Libya, the province of Fezzan, which includes much of the Berber population, is part of the Sahara desert. It would become the last reluctant piece of the Libyan jigsaw.

The creation of Libya was the final act of the ‘Scramble for Africa’ that began in the early 1880s and three decades later had transformed the entire continent from indigenous rule to European domination. By the end of 1881, after France had grabbed Tunisia, Libya’s three provinces were the only ones in North Africa not snatched by a European power.
²
At this time Libya’s oil had not been discovered, so when the Italians began to wrestle the lands from the remnants of the Ottoman Empire in 1911 it must have felt to them like the best stuff had already gone to the British and the French. Libya was ‘Largely desert with some limited potential for urban and sedentary life’.
³

The Italian conquest was clumsy and brutal and was interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War. At this stage Rome, while neutral, leant towards the losing side. However in April 1915, under the secret ‘Treaty of London’, Article 13 promised that if the Italians agreed to break with their old German and Austro-Hungarian allies and entered the war on the opposing side, ‘France and Great Britain [would] recognise to Italy . . . the right of demanding for herself certain compensations in the form of an extension of her possessions in Eritrea, Somaliland and Libya’.
⁴
So Italy got Libya, and the old provinces got ‘Libya’, a neologism the Italians created from the Greek word meaning the whole of North Africa except Egypt and which the Italians then used to describe their new possession. After 1934, by which time the three provinces were unified, ‘Libya’ was how the country would henceforth be internationally known.
⁵

The Italians were kicked out of the country long before the oil started to flow, so they too must have wondered at times if it was worth fighting for. But fight they did, and – like colonialists everywhere – in battle they treated the local population with great cruelty, including the use of concentration camps. Italy, in the end, got little out of Libya apart from some misplaced pride about having a bit of an empire and a chunk of largely barren land on which to dump its own landless poor by the tens of thousands. Unlike other colonialists it did not co-opt, educate and train a section of the indigenous society to run things on its behalf. While this was never a noble gesture by occupiers, it did at least create a tier of locally administered bureaucracy that helped run the functions of a new state when the invaders packed up and left.

Italy did not try very hard to make any friends in Libya, and from the moment its naval contingent set foot on dry land in 1911 it was confronted with an insurgency that would take twenty years to put down. The Italians discovered what Colonel Gaddafi would find out in the century that followed: the only thing that can broadly unite Libyans, apart from their Sunni Muslim faith, is a common enemy. Ironically Gaddafi’s troops would find themselves fighting against men who invoked the same symbol of resistance that inspired the guerrilla warfare against the Italians, and whose memory Gaddafi had always tried in the past to use to boost his own popularity.

Everywhere I went during the war, ninety years after the Italians began wandering these lands, I saw the image of the man who haunted them. It was carried by the early street protesters in Tripoli, on the front line in the east and in blockaded Misrata. On flags, on T-shirts and painted on the sides of their pickup trucks as fighters drove into battle was the bearded image of Omar Mukhtar. He was born in 1862 in a small village near Tobruk in Cyrenaica. He was a teacher of the Koran and belonged to the Senussi Muslim religious order that was founded in Mecca in 1837 by the Grand Senussi – Sayyid Muhammad ibn Ali as-Senussi. The Senussi order led the uprising against the Italians. They were the only institution in the three provinces organised enough to do so, but they were a firmly Cyrenaica-based order. Like the earlier teachings of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab in Saudi Arabia, the Grand Senussi sought to return to a purer form of Islam, though his teachings did not go on to produce in Libya today the kind of widespread, uncompromising Salafist groups that Wahhabism has in the rest of the modern Middle East. The Grand Senussi’s revivalist, austere form of the faith appealed to the Bedouins of Cyrenaica whose own lives had not changed for generations.

The Ottoman Empire had been fairly hands-off in its administration of the three provinces and it was at least of the same faith. The Italians were quite definitely unendearing foreigners, and it wasn’t hard for the Senussis to encourage revolt. By far the greatest leader of that resistance was Omar Mukhtar. From the moment he took up arms to the moment the Italians hanged him on 16 September 1931 he fought a campaign that embarrassed and undermined the occupying forces.