Libya needs help to create stability and a government

A solution to the crisis in Libya can be found, but only with a great deal of commitment, says HA Hellyer

Members of the Libyan pro-government forces stand on a tank during their deployment near the city of Derna, Libya. Reuters

Libya continues to fester like an open wound – the pain of it being most urgently felt by Libyans. The repercussions of the Libyan quandary, however, affect neighbouring countries in Africa. A short distance north, European states are beginning to look at the country’s problems with more urgency. But will the international community assist Libya from amid the abyss – or will it wait, until it is too late to save Libyans from an even worse calamity?

The question is not whether Libya will enter a dark phase. That has already happened. The United Nations Special Representative for Libya, Bernardino Leon, has been trying to put forward a plan to form a national unity government for months. His self-imposed deadline has just passed. Mr Leon had hoped that his framework for getting elements from the Tripoli authority to work with the internationally recognised government in Tobruk would be accepted by the beginning of Ramadan. Alas, that has not been successful. In the meantime, it is Libyans who pay the price.

Libya’s conflict between forces loyal to Tobruk and Tripoli would be bad enough on its own, but the rise of ISIL elements in the north of the country has disrupted a number of towns and has made this conflict a part of the transnational fight against extremism.

The waves of migrants trying to reach European shores through Libyan territory, who are themselves victims of the most abysmal practices of human trafficking, attract another type of attention altogether. Rather than constructing a plan to protect the legitimate rights of these migrants from being exploited, the focus has been to ensure they simply don’t enter Europe.

There is a solution for Libya, but it will not be possible to achieve it without a great deal of commitment. The search for a national unity government is, indeed, the correct first step. Whether or not that will come out of Mr Leon’s process is unclear.

The drafts of his plan are each markedly different as they develop – and Mr Leon will need to ensure that he has the internationally recognised government on side as well as elements in the west of the country to join in. The real deadline in that regard might not be Ramadan at all. Rather it may be the expiration of the legal term of the House of Representatives.

But the formation of any national unity government will only be the first stage of any solution in Libya. The country’s security problems can only be solved with outside assistance. Western capitals are, naturally, concerned about intervening in Libya – the history of western interventions has not been particularly inspiring in recent years. With an authority that commands the entire country, such as a national unity government, that trepidation might be overcome. Following any government formation, if the UN Security Council would allow for a clearly defined intervention by the international community, ISIL in Libya might see its outpost in that country be pushed back – and the country brought back from the brink.

The problem with that scenario is the same with many military interventions – that there is often not a sufficiently robust plan to consider the day after. The spectre of Iraq in 2003 likewise haunts western capitals when considering any type of intervention – but it is not Iraq that policymakers should be thinking of, except in terms of how not to intervene in a country. Rather, it is the likes of East Timor and Kosovo.

The people of Kosovo welcomed a military intervention by the west in 1999 – but they also knew and understood that the international community would have to remain for a while thereafter, to ensure institutions would be built. Similarly in East Timor, an international commitment was vital to put the new country on its feet. With Libya, too, there must finally be recognition that Qaddafi crippled the state – and it has never recovered.

The post-Qaddafi political order has to build something up to replace that state, basing it on institutions rather than the personality of a single man. That may mean a strong peacekeeping force from different parts of the international community, but it may also mean that the UN consider engaging in administration far more directly. If we consider the East Timor model, for example, we might get somewhere, but tailored particularly to what Libyans would want and require.

There are no easy answers for Libya. That much is clear, but are we able to start asking the right questions? Or, four years after the fall of Qaddafi, is the international community really willing to let Libya become chaos on the Mediterranean?

Dr HA Hellyer is an associate fellow in international security Studies at the Royal United Services Institute in London, and the Centre for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC

On Twitter: @hahellyer