Abdelkader Assad

As years of freedom rang five, Libya and its long-yearned-for revolution is still struggling to prove it deserves to be stable, secure, and in full control of its territories, though all what the Libyans aspired for is still put on the back burner.

Back in August 2011, Libyans gathered and celebrated the fall of the tyranny; the fall of dictator Muamar Gaddafi and his regime. Now in 2016, Libyans found themselves much closer to everything they renounced in the revolution days than they are to freedom. Voices across the country chanted rejection and pronounced condemnation of division, terrorism, dictatorship, nepotism, and the like; however, here are the Libyans facing what once was just a thought-of threat.   

Now as never before, the threat of division, the confidante character of the Libyan “play”, is a little too much trendy among Libyan politicians and stakeholders. Many a party is trying to advocate the ideology of separating the country into three regions – east, west and south, each having its own capital. According to the most recent outcomes of the Libyan Work Committee of the Constitution Drafting Assembly, Tripoli would be a western capital taking care of political issues; Benghazi would be a capital to the east and be responsible for the economy of the country, while Sabha would be Libya’s southern capital, which would take care of culture and tourism.

Therefore, division is on the ascendency in a country that is already formed by tribal and regional fabric. The fabric that was also fueled by the abundant amounts of bloodshed across the country as different warring parties conflicted to win the upper hand in power.  

Khalifa Haftar, the dynamic character in the play, has been one encouraging element in the fall of Libya’s unity, his Dignity Operation, which started in May 2014, shredded the city of the revolution, Benghazi, into pieces. He and his followers, who claim to be the legitimate Libyan Army as per the Tobruk Parliament’s charter that appointed Hafter as the Chief Commander, waged an all-out, continuous and destructive war on Benghazi revolutionaries, whom he called terrorists and renegades. By this war, Hafter helped crack the fabric of the society and widen the gap among Libyans across the country, in the east and west in particular.

On many levels, IS/Daesh is the foil character in the Libyan “play”, their spill to the war-torn Libya was a turning point, the possibilities of the threat became more evident day by day, and so did IS. The terrorist group spilled into Derna, Sirte, and Sabratha, let alone the some unidentified numbers in Benghazi. Recent reports by the French newspaper, Le Journal du Dimanche, stated that IS presence in Libya grew to 5000 fighters, among whom there are tens of French nationals.

In Derna, IS militants were cornered in Al-Fatayeh district by the city’s Shura Council revolutionaries and were renounced by all of the local residents, and thus lost the social support element. In Sirte, IS stronghold, the terrorist group is still in control of the city with unverified numbers of fighters from 2500 to 3500 amid a wave of residents’ departure from the city into safer areas, mostly western ones.

Similarly IS militants took refuge in Sabratha city, close to a Tunisian border with Libya, and for the most part they were inactive in sleeping cells until February 19, when the U.S carried out an airstrike on a training camp full of IS recruits in the city, killing almost 50 Tunisians, among whom were two abducted Serbs from the Serbian Embassy personnel in Libya. Only then and after 4 days of the strike, they tried to control Sabratha’s city center and occupied it briefly before the city’s military council’s fighters pushed them to the fringes of the city.    

Worse yet, the incidents in Libya intensified by the UN political intervention, a very flat character in this entangled paly, as it added another nail in the coffin of the political division Libya was suffering from by pushing some parties to endorse a Government of National Accord under its sponsorship. This GNA was formed, in Skhirat - Morocco, as a third rival government because both the Tripoli-based General National Congress and Tobruk-based House of Representatives rejected it and its UN-backed Presidential Council, headed by Fayiz Al-Serraj.

This intervention comes amid a pretty much deteriorated situation prevailing across the country, making the Libyan “play” so variant in characters. Take for example, the issue of loose borders in the south, west, and east, boosting smuggling of oil, people and drugs. On daily basis, many immigrants go on rickety boats off the Libyan shores from Zuwara, Al-Garabulli, Al-Khumus and other cities, then they set off to Europe making Libya a jumping off point for immigrants bound to Europe.

In a nutshell, Libya is a play, well plotted with characters, each of which is trying to prove it deserves to be the protagonist, and if not, it would risk it all and play as the antagonist to defeat whoever opposes it and reign solely in the country. Would Libya climax? Or is it already climaxing now? Because if it is, we will all witness the denouement and thus see the conflict and the crisis untangle revealing the mysteries behind Libya’s, tragic or happy ending.     

 

Disclaimer:  The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect those of the Libya Observer

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