Revealed: Top Libya analyst evaluates Russia and UN plans

An expert on Libyan politics has warned of the Kremlin’s free reign in the Benghazi-based government of Eastern Libya, and their interest in jeopardising any attempts to unify the country.

Hafed Al-Ghwell, a senior fellow and executive director of the North Africa Initiative at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, said Khalifa Haftar, the “warlord” in Benghazi, was “simply a mule” that Moscow used to enter into Libya.

In an exclusive interview with Maghrebi.org, he laid bare the reality of Haftar’s fatal embrace with Vladimir Putin.

Al-Gwell said: “He has absolutely no control over anything that has to do with the Russians. He says that in meetings.”

“He says that even to American officials, when they ask him that he should request the Russians go out. He is completely out of the loop when it comes to Russian thinking, Russian strategy.”

It was in 2019 that Haftar let the proverbial devil in, hoping Moscow’s aid would guarantee the success of his offensive against Tripoli and cement his rule over all of Libya.

His defeat, in part due to a tactical retreat by his Russian allies, led him to rely further on foreign support, as the Atlantic Council puts it – completing his transformation, in the eyes of the Russians, into an “unreliable paper tiger”.

Al-Gwell said: “They’re not going to get out unless something major happens, like what happened in Syria, where they have no institutions and they’re not even able to to give them a political cover.”

“But that’s not going to happen. The idea that somehow anybody ever had any control over the Russians in Libya is a fantasy.”

From this viewpoint, the UN’s new push for agreement between the two rival governments on a framework to hold unifying elections, becomes terribly severed from reality.

Not only has Moscow been blocking all kinds of motions at the UN Security Council, but according to Al-Ghwell, any strong government is anathema to its interests.

He said: “The Russians don’t want somebody, even their ally Haftar, to actually be in control of what they do. They have their own agenda, which is a Pan African and Sahel agenda.”

“They are in about nine or 10 African countries, and all that operation is dependent on their bases in Libya, so they have no interest like everybody else.”

However, Russia’s powerful shadow and the spectacle of its redeployment from Syria belies the myriad of invisible foreign forces marauding across Libya.

History seemed to repeat itself as the UN announced a new initiative in December, following the failures of a similar campaign back in 2021.

Little has changed in their approach as Al-Ghwell remarks: “The UN in Libya is determined to prove Einstein right that insanity is trying is doing the same thing over and over again and thinking that each time you’re going to have a different result.”

Read more articles written by Hafed Al-Ghawell here

“All of this talk about elections is complete nonsense. I mean, nobody has an interest in doing an election, including the internationals. And once you talk to them privately – I challenged them on the election – they all agree it’s not a priority for them.”

“They just talk about it because sounds nice when you do a press release.”

For the Europeans, and particularly Italy, stemming migration from Libya has been a major interest but human rights organisations, such as the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, say their methods have not delivered on their promise to keep migrants safe.

The ECCHR wrote: “In Libya the torture and killing of migrants in detention, their abandonment at sea or in the desert; being held in conditions akin to slavery; being subject to starvation and other serious human rights violations have been documented extensively by the UN’s Independent Fact Finding Mission on Libya and other bodies.”

Doing the dirty work is a network of local militias in the pocket of the EU, according to The Guardian in 2023. The secrecy of the operation is paramount – not a service a legitimate government could easily offer.

Al-Ghwell said: “The whole thing is really just simply trying to maintain the status quo until something else happens.”

“Everybody’s benefiting from the status quo, including the internationals, because there is no killing on the ground. They can play one side or on the other, and make all kinds of deals with everybody.”

Add to this the unreality of Libya’s institutions – Haftar’s Libyan National Army, in Al-Ghwell’s words “a family owned company”, is covered by the charade of the Benghazi-based House of Representatives, while President Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh runs a “family affair” in Tripoli, sanctified by the so-called State Council – and the abyss of the problem begins to emerge.

These four institutions are the Gordian knots of structural rot suffocating the heart of Libya.

He said: “Anybody you can talk to about Libya will identify these four as the major blocks, but nobody is willing to take a real official, public position against them, because they have tentacles [originating] everywhere in the West. Some are being played by France, some are Italy, some United States, some are the UAE, some Turkey, some Egypt.”

“Everyone of these country’s intelligence services is supporting one side or another, or switching. One day they support this, the second day they change to this thing. So it’s a completely mafia owned and operated country. That’s the basic definition of Libya.”

“You’re not dealing with institutions, you’re dealing with personalities and families. And so unless the UN sanctions or somehow pressures these four blocks, nothing is going to move except press releases and meetings and all of that. Nothing major on the ground is going to change.”

With the sickness so entrenched, the cure must be radical.

From its independence from Italy in 1951 till 1963, Libya was a constitutional monarchy with a bicameral legislature split into three federal states.

While the King Idris held substantial power, he enjoyed the “broad support” of the nation with a challenging number of different tribes from which to gain consensus, according to The Atlantic Council.

Crucially, oil was controlled at the federal level, as was foreign affairs.

Al-Ghwell sees the constitution of this short period as the solution, with a federal system being key to governing such an ethnically and culturally diverse region.

He said: “If you want to go back to the federal level, you’re going to need to have multiple states, probably around 10 or 12, because  of the dynamic demographics. All of that changed in the last 60 years.”

“But it has to be federal, because Libya, historically was not really one country. The people who made it into one country is the Italian occupation.”

Libya has the largest known oil reserves in Africa and at the zenith of its production in the 1970s, was the second largest Arab oil producer after Saudi Arabia.

Those days when the country pumped out 3.4 million barrels a day are long gone, and in recent years, targets like the 2.2 million barrels per day set in 2017 have failed to materialise, primarily due to politics and poor governance according to GIS Report.

Libya’s volatile history has long held the industry hostage and prevented the country’s full utilization of its national resources.

Al-Ghwell says oil and the allocation of its proceeds is the single biggest roadblock to the federalisation of the country.

He said: “The biggest stick for that is the oil distribution, the wealth. That’s where they’re gonna fight.”

“If you tell them…each one of you have your own police force, your own tax system, your own traffic laws, they all agree, no problem. But how big a share of the oil does each one of them get?

“That needs to be stay on the federal level and then distributed between these states in terms of grants, projects, that kind of stuff. And then they have to agree.”

Perhaps the time is not ripe for a new Libyan constitution, the institutions too rotted and interplay of foreign interests too complex for international consensus.

The Russian bulwark, the EU’s ‘Janus’ policies, Arab agents stalking the halls of power in Tripoli – all make the task seemly insurmountable.

But as we’ve seen with Syria, if the giants align, then overnight, water can indeed be turned to wine.