As Britons the world over absorbed the horror of the Manchester bomb attack perpetrated by a young British-Libyan, Salman Abedi, I happened, quite coincidentally, to be reading Hisham Matar’s The Return. It is a moving, many-layered memoir of the acclaimed novelist’s attempt to find out what had happened to his father Jabala, a Libyan opposition figure kidnapped and jailed by the Qaddafi regime in 1990. But leafing through it in the aftermath of the attack provided a sharp and poignant reminder that after the fall of the “Mad dog of the Middle East”, as Ronald Reagan called him, there was a period of hope.
Mr Matar goes back to the country he had left as a child, in early 2012 and arrives in a land that seems to be recovering itself – its freedoms, its literature, its judiciary, its joy itself. He travels around re-encountering a never-ending stream of relatives, gives a book-reading in a library, takes strolls through Italianate boulevards, and smokes incessantly when not being plied with food.
In an interview with The National a few months before, in October 2011, he explained the mood at the time: "It's as if these regimes were sitting literally on top of us. There's a new ease, a new optimism, a new sense of ownership of the future."
In his memoir, Mr Matar even contemplates returning to live in Benghazi with his American wife. The contrast with a Libya that is now exporting terror in the form of sons who were not even born there, but have returned to be radicalised, or have their radicalisation weaponised, is painful indeed. And that is even before one considers all the other dread deeds in the civil war into which the country later fell, including the establishment of an ISIL stronghold in Sirte.
All this revives the question of just who was responsible for the tragedy that befell Libya; one that has caused instability in the region and beyond, and extinguished a brief spring in a country that had languished under dictatorship since 1969. (Just to be clear about the nature of Qaddafi’s rule, by 1975 Egypt’s Anwar Sadat was already calling him "possessed by the devil".)
Libyans’ own culpability cannot be entirely ignored. It is, after all, by and large Libyans who have been fighting and killing each other; although the leadership of Field Marshal Haftar and the mediation facilitated by Abu Dhabi may eventually bring stability.
But outside parties played an outsize role in the change of regime. Barack Obama may have said that “failing to plan for the day after…in intervening in Libya” was probably the worst mistake of his presidency. But it was Britain and France who were really gung-ho about toppling the self-promoted colonel.
Iraq should have been a lesson to western interventionists, and Arab countries could have told them to prepare for that “day after”, had they been thoroughly consulted.
Instead, Britain in particular continued a long pattern of sending mixed signals to Middle Eastern countries, culminating in interventions that almost always end disastrously. The UK’s record vis-à-vis Libya was especially mixed.
In 1986, Britain was the only European country to permit American bombers to take off from their soil to launch a revenge strike on Libya. Ten years later, it is alleged that MI6 backed an attempted coup by the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a radical Islamist group with strong ties to Al Qaeda.
After relations with Libya were normalised under Tony Blair in 2004, however, there was a complete volte face – and not just in how the old dictator had turned from a sponsor of state terrorism to “an intelligent guy” who “recognises that the world has changed and that he has to change with it”, as the foreign office minister Mike O’Brien told me in 2009.
Britain then aided in the rendition of former LIFG members who were handed over to Qaddafi’s forces to be tortured and jailed. As the senior MI6 officer Sir Mark Allen infamously wrote in a letter discovered in the house of Qaddafi’s intelligence chief, Moussa Koussa: “This is the least we could do for you and for Libya to demonstrate the remarkable relationship we have built over recent years.”
In a final reversal, as the UK turned once again against Col Qaddafi, it is claimed that Libyan rebels and dissident Islamists who were living in Britain were given an “open door” by MI5 to return home to fight to overthrow Qaddafi – even if they were subject to travel bans.
This inconsistent approach, and the dangerous and foolish supposition that collaborating with violent Islamists runs no risk of blowback, both in Britain and in their own countries, failed utterly in Libya and in Manchester. Salman Abedi’s father Ramadan was also a member of the LIFG.
If the West had not intervened in Libya, who can tell what would have happened? But if the new partnership Donald Trump announced in Riyadh this month is to succeed, Libya’s sad tale surely offers the following lesson: that any future interventions must be driven by the Arab nations – and let western partners follow and support.
Well-intentioned outsiders have wreaked havoc and run away too many times for that formula ever to be repeated again.
Sholto Byrnes is a senior fellow at the Institute of Strategic and International Studies, Malaysia
