Libya’s fuel crisis and the politics of migrant blame

As petrol queues stretched across Tripoli and authorities closed hundreds of non compliant fuel stations, public anger was also gathering outside the UNHCR office where protesters demanded that migrants and refugees leave the country.

The two developments are not simple parallel stories, the fuel shortage points to a system in which subsidised resources are diverted through illegal depots, non compliant stations and smuggling networks before reaching ordinary Libyans who are being hit by a migration surge that further stress fuel demand and its consequential shortage.

Yet the political opinion has increasingly and excessively focused on migrants, refugees and international organisations which are being treated as symbols of pressure on services, sovereignty and national identity while also endangering the everyday life of most civilians.

According to the Interior Minister, Emad Trabelsi, this migrant surge is merely a fraction of the causes the led to the current fuel shortage as more than 500 non compliant petrol stations had been closed and will not be allowed to reopen and other 394 suspected stations in western Libya are being monitored.

Fuel in Libya is a public subsidy, a political entitlement, a daily necessity and at the same time a black market opportunity, this is why when supply breaks down the immediate result is public anger with the result of a loss of trust in the state’s ability to defend citizens.

National Oil Corporation (NOC) chairman, Masoud Suleiman, has insisted that fuel supplies remain available. His explanation is that the recent crisis was partly driven by an exceptional surge in demand during Eid even though Tripoli reportedly received around 11 million litres of gasoline on the day before Eid compared with around 5 million litres in similar previous periods. Daily distribution later remained between 9 million and 9.5 million litres while normal consumption is usually around 6.5 million litres.

This numbers explain that if Libya was pumping more fuel than usual the queues cannot be explained only by shortage or an exceptional demand surge, but they suggests mass panic buying, bottlenecks and  diversion from the official chain.

Suleiman claimed that some delivery trucks reportedly fail to deliver their loads to assigned petrol stations and unload instead at illegal depots and that some petrol stations, including the ones being investigated, sell only part of their allocation to the public and divert the rest to smugglers at inflated prices.

This means that ordinary Libyans are not simply waiting because the state lacks fuel but because parts of the distribution chain have become vulnerable to capture.

That distinction matters for the anti-migration debate as the economic pressure felt by citizens is real, but the causes are embedded in Libya’s own political economy directly caused by weak monitoring, fragmented enforcement, subsidised pricing, smuggling routes and operators able to profit from disorder.

Yet migrants are easier to see than fuel smugglers, they are visible in streets, informal work sites, neighbourhoods and public spaces. They are often poor, undocumented or dependent on aid and they cannot defend themselves through armed networks, state institutions or political patronage. This causes visibility to become vulnerability.

Reuters reported that hundreds of Libyans blocked the entrance of the UNHCR office in Tripoli on June 4th, protesting against settlement and demanding that migrants leave the country, the protest followed several recent demonstrations against migration with UNHCR being increasingly seen as a symbol of what some Libyans describe as foreign pressure to keep migrants inside the country.

The UN mission responded by recognising the right to peaceful protest while also warning against incitement to violence and attacks on UN staff or premises, UNHCR has also stressed that it does not run any programme to resettle migrants inside Libya and has no sovereign power over migration policy.

That clarification has not removed the suspicion, as Libya Herald reported on June 3rd, that opposition to settlement, resettlement and naturalisation has been growing under slogans such as “No to Settlement, No to Naturalisation, Libya is for Libyans.”

The House of Representatives has reinforced that claims made from the institutional side, rejecting any projects or arrangements that could lead to the resettlement or naturalisation of foreigners in Libya, framing the issue as a matter of sovereignty.

The same statement linked migration to the problems facing Libyan citizens including housing, employment, basic services and the economic consequences of repeated crises.

The Libyan Organization for Human Rights added another layer by calling for a national body to manage migration and asylum. Its head, Hanan Al-Sharif, described the issue as a sovereign issue requiring clearer national management.

But there is a difference between national management and collective blame, a serious migration policy would define legal status, labour rights, border procedures, detention standards and the role of international agencies. A politics of blame instead treats migrants as the reason citizens cannot access services, jobs, security or even fuel.

The fuel crisis specifically shows why that is misleading, petrol queues were not created by refugees, illegal fuel depots were not created by UNHCR, the diversion of subsidised fuel into smuggling networks is not caused by Sudanese, Nigerien, Chadian, Egyptian or Bangladeshi migrants waiting in Libya or trying to cross the Mediterranean.

The pressure on ordinary Libyans is coming from a state that cannot reliably protect public resources from capture as fuel disappears into informal networks. Import systems require new restrictions because speculation distorts supply. It is in this context that migration becomes a politically useful explanation for a broader failure of governance.

That does not mean Libyan concerns should not be taken into consideration, Libya is hosting a large migrant population while lacking a unified state, a stable economy or a functioning asylum system while also being under pressure from European migration policy, which has treated the country as a containment space for people trying to reach the Mediterranean.

The “Refugees in Libya” movement warned that dehumanising language against migrants, refugees and asylum seekers risks preparing the ground for exclusion and violence as economic frustration can quickly become social hostility when public debate starts describing people as a threat rather than as workers, families, refugees or people trapped inside the same failed system.

The fuel crisis should be forcing Libya to ask harder questions about who profits from scarcity. Which stations received allocations but failed to sell them to the public? Which transport routes feed illegal depots? Which networks move subsidised fuel toward foreign markets? Which institutions failed to monitor distribution before queues reached the street?

Those are difficult questions since they point upward and inward, toward operators, smugglers and forms of protection that may be embedded in Libya’s fragmented political order.

This is why the fuel shortage matters beyond petrol, showing how scarcity can reshape the public opinion and related political anger.

A credible state response would not separate the two issues band it would treat both fuel and migration as symptoms of the same disease: the absence of enforceable, trusted public authority.

Fuel distribution needs transparent tracking, licensing enforcement, penalties for diversion and action against illegal depots while migration management needs national coordination, legal clarity, protection standards and public communication that explains what UN agencies are doing and what they are not doing.

Without those reforms, Libya risks repeating the same pattern across different crises in space and time.

Maghrebi.org, Libyan Organization for HR, UNHCR, Libya Herald, Reuters.