Duncan Bowie on UN peacemaking
Libya since Qaddafi by Stephanie Williams published by Hurst
Williams is an experienced US diplomat who was sent by the UN as a mediator in the Libyan civil war, initially as deputy to the Lebanese academic and diplomat, Ghassan Salamé. The mediation led to a ceasefire agreement between the conflicting parties in October 2020. Williams’ book sets out the details of the peace negotiations. Williams was in Libya between October 2020 and February 2021 and then served as special advisor on Libya to the UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, until 2022.
The UN has a significant historic role in Libya, as the country was in effect created by the UN in 1952, following the Italian occupation and the wartime and postwar administration by Britain and France. It was a Dutch UN diplomat, Adriaan Pelt, who negotiated the agreement that led to Libyan independence and drafted the first constitution, a process covered in detail in Pelt’s own 1970 book Libyan Independence and the United Nations: A Case of Planned Decolonisation. Libya became a monarchy under King Idris until the coup led by Qadaffi in 1969, who ruled the country until he was assassinated by rebel forces in the 2011 uprising.
The 2011 uprising, initiated in Benghazi, was supported by the first use of the “Right to Protect” UN power, with the military intervention being led by NATO, but specifically by the US, the UK and France, and rather curiously Norway (with some other NATO members opting out). French and UK bomber jets and special forces on the ground transformed the mission to protect civilians from Qaddafi’s forces to explicit support for the rebels, and it is unlikely that without this assistance Qaddafi’s regime would have fallen. As in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, these powers gave little thought as to how the governance of Libya could be reconstructed. Both the UK and France had their favoured groups of rebels, as did Qatar and the UAE, which also provided both armaments and military advisors on the ground. The US, having provided the air strikes, did not get involved in the civil war on the ground.
Hurst has published two earlier books on the uprising and the immediate post-uprising period: All Necessary Measures?, published in 2022, by Ian Martin, the former Amnesty International Secretary General who was appointed UN envoy in Libya in 2011 and then head of the UN peacemaking mission UNSMIL; and The Libyan Revolution and its Aftermath, a set of essays by academics and diplomats, edited by Peter Cole and Brian McQuinn in 2015. Both these books are essential reading in terms of providing the background to Williams” book.
Williams’ study covers in detail the second Libyan civil war of 2019-20, initiated by the attack of the Benghazi based Khalifa Haftar on Western Libya. Cole and McQuinn’s earlier book sets out the growth of separatist sentiment in Eastern Libya, which resented the attempt of the Tripoli-based government to centralise power. This time there was no military intervention by NATO or individual NATO members. Perhaps lessons had been learnt from the experience of 2011. Moreover there was no repeat of the previous UN use of “Right to Protect” powers to justify military intervention. This time both Russia and China would use their veto powers to stop this rather than abstain in a Security Council vote.
It was Germany, under the leadership of Angela Merkel, who led the Berlin Process which eventually produced the ceasefire – Germany being regarded by Libyans as neutral as it had not supported the NATO military intervention in 2011. The Berlin conference in January 2020 involved the League of Arab States, the African Union, the EU, United Arab Emirates, Turkey and the US as well as the conflicting Libyan parties.
Libya remains marked by ongoing violence, humanitarian crises, with efforts for reconciliation and stability facing numerous obstacles given the complex political landscape, including tribal and regional rivalries, the continuing existence of militias and the role of the country in smuggling sub-Saharan Africans to Europe. There remains the potential for further escalation, which is beyond the powers of both the Libyan administration and international stakeholders to control. The main objective of European governments is to limit migration and with the attention of the weakened United Nations being elsewhere, given the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, it is only the Libyans who can stabilise the political and economic situation within the country. Arguably, a decentralised federal state is the only way to at least partly reduce conflicts between West and East Libya, while the South, a border zone with Algeria, the Sudan, Chad and Niger, all countries which are themselves politically unstable, is clearly beyond any centralised control. The UN really has no role any more and it is perhaps best that both NATO and the EU don’t intervene which could only make matters worse.