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Libya: Reflections, Mamdani, Cole
AfricaFocus Bulletin
Sep 19, 2011 (110919)
(Reposted from sources cited below)
Editor's Note
"Whereas the fall of Mubarak and Ben Ali directed our
attention to internal social forces, the fall of Gaddafi
has brought a new equation to the forefront: the connection
between internal opposition and external governments. Even
if those who cheer focus on the former and those who mourn
are preoccupied with the latter, none can deny that the
change in Tripoli would have been unlikely without a
confluence of external intervention and internal revolt.
... One thing should be clear: those interested in keeping
external intervention at bay need to concentrate their
attention and energies on internal reform." - Mahmood
Mamdani
As was the case for Tunisia and Egypt, there has been no
shortage of day-to-day news coverage (often contradictory)
and impassioned international policy debate on the Libyan
component of the Arab Awakening. But there has been much
less solid analysis, as the popular overthrow of Libya's
dictator was complicated not only by the turn to armed
conflict but also by the decisive role played by NATO air
power and significant external assistance to the rebels,
primarily from France, Britain, and Qatar.
As the open military conflict at least appears to be in its
final stages, there is also no shortage of advice to the
new Libyan regime and speculation about its chances of
success. But there are still few systematic analyses of
what happened which carefully consider the internal
dynamics of Libya and the Arab world as well as the
significance of NATO intervention.
For previous AfricaFocus Bulletins on Libya, including a
fundamental historical analysis by Fred Halliday and
several Bulletins on issues related to migrants from subSaharan
Africa, see
http://www.africafocus.org/country/libya.php
This series of AfricaFocus Bulletins on the significance of
recent events in Libya provides a selection of material
that I have found most useful, in three parts:
(1) a long commentary by historian and blogger PT Zeleza
(distributed by e-mail and on the web at
http://www.africafocus.org/docs11/lib1109a.php) This is the
most nuanced broad analysis on the topic that I have seen.
(2) shorter commentaries by Mahmood Mamdani and Juan Cole
(this one, on the web at http://www.africafocus.org/docs11/lib1109b.php) Mamdani
focuses on the consequences for other Africa countries.
Cole provides a sharp analysis of the myths invoked by many
critics of the international intervention.
and
(3) a compilation of links and brief excerpts from
additional articles, with short annotations/observations/questions by the AfricaFocus
editor (on the web at http://www.africafocus.org/docs11/lib1109c.php)
Suggestions from readers are welcome for links to key
analytical articles that might be added to this page.
++++++++++++++++++++++end editor's note+++++++++++++++++
What does Gaddafi's fall mean for Africa?
As global powers become more interested in Africa,
interventions in the continent will likely become more
common.
Mahmood Mamdani
30 Aug 2011
http://english.aljazeera.net / direct URL:
http://tinyurl.com/3c775tk
Mahmood Mamdani is professor and director of Makerere
Institute of Social Research at Makerere University,
Kampala, Uganda, and Herbert Lehman Professor of Government
at Columbia University, New York. He is the author most
recently of Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, The Cold War
and the Roots of Terror, and Saviors and Survivors: Darfur,
Politics and the War on Terror.
"Kampala 'mute' as Gaddafi falls," is how the opposition
paper summed up the mood of this capital the morning after.
Whether they mourn or celebrate, an unmistakable sense of
trauma marks the African response to the fall of Gaddafi.
Both in the longevity of his rule and in his style of
governance, Gaddafi may have been extreme. But he was not
exceptional. The longer they stay in power, the more
African presidents seek to personalise power. Their success
erodes the institutional basis of the state. The Carribean
thinker C L R James once remarked on the contrast between
Nyerere and Nkrumah, analysing why the former survived
until he resigned but the latter did not: "Dr Julius
Nyerere in theory and practice laid the basis of an African
state, which Nkrumah failed to do."
The African strongmen are going the way of Nkrumah, and in
extreme cases Gaddafi, not Nyerere. The societies they lead
are marked by growing internal divisions. In this, too,
they are reminiscent of Libya under Gaddafi more than Egypt
under Mubarak or Tunisia under Ben Ali.
Whereas the fall of Mubarak and Ben Ali directed our
attention to internal social forces, the fall of Gaddafi
has brought a new equation to the forefront: the connection
between internal opposition and external governments. Even
if those who cheer focus on the former and those who mourn
are preoccupied with the latter, none can deny that the
change in Tripoli would have been unlikely without a
confluence of external intervention and internal revolt.
More interventions to come
The conditions making for external intervention in Africa
are growing, not diminishing. The continent is today the
site of a growing contention between dominant global powers
and new challengers. The Chinese role on the continent has
grown dramatically. Whether in Sudan and Zimbawe, or in
Ethiopia, Kenya and Nigeria, that role is primarily
economic, focused on two main activities: building
infrastructure and extracting raw materials. For its part,
the Indian state is content to support Indian megacorporations;
it has yet to develop a coherent state
strategy. But the Indian focus too is mainly economic.
The contrast with Western powers, particularly the US and
France, could not be sharper. The cutting edge of Western
intervention is military. France's search for opportunities
for military intervention, at first in Tunisia, then Cote
d'Ivoire, and then Libya, has been above board and the
subject of much discussion. Of greater significance is the
growth of Africom, the institutional arm of US military
intervention on the African continent.
This is the backdrop against which African strongmen and
their respective oppositions today make their choices.
Unlike in the Cold War, Africa's strongmen are weary of
choosing sides in the new contention for Africa.
Exemplified by President Museveni of Uganda, they seek to
gain from multiple partnerships, welcoming the Chinese and
the Indians on the economic plane, while at the same time
seeking a strategic military presence with the US as it
wages its War on Terror on the African continent.
In contrast, African oppositions tend to look mainly to the
West for support, both financial and military. It is no
secret that in just about every African country, the
opposition is drooling at the prospect of Western
intervention in the aftermath of the fall of Gaddafi.
Those with a historical bent may want to think of a time
over a century ago, in the decade that followed the Berlin
conference, when outside powers sliced up the continent.
Our predicament today may give us a more realistic
appreciation of the real choices faced and made by the
generations that went before us. Could it have been that
those who then welcomed external intervention did so
because they saw it as the only way of getting rid of
domestic oppression?
In the past decade, Western powers have created a political
and legal infrastructure for intervention in otherwise
independent countries. Key to that infrastructure are two
institutions, the United Nations Security Council and the
International Criminal Court. Both work politically, that
is, selectively. To that extent, neither works in the
interest of creating a rule of law.
The Security Council identifies states guilty of committing
"crimes against humanity" and sanctions intervention as
part of a "responsibility to protect" civilians. Third
parties, other states armed to the teeth, are then free to
carry out the intervention without accountability to
anyone, including the Security Council. The ICC, in toe
with the Security Council, targets the leaders of the state
in question for criminal investigation and prosecution.
Africans have been complicit in this, even if
unintentionally. Sometimes, it is as if we have been a few
steps behind in a game of chess. An African Secretary
General tabled the proposal that has come to be called R2P,
Responsibility to Protect. Without the vote of Nigeria and
South Africa, the resolution authorising intervention in
Libya would not have passed in the Security Council.
Dark days are ahead. More and more African societies are
deeply divided internally. Africans need to reflect on the
fall of Gaddafi and, before him, that of Gbagbo in Cote
d'Ivoire. Will these events usher in an era of external
interventions, each welcomed internally as a mechanism to
ensure a change of political leadership in one country
after another?
One thing should be clear: those interested in keeping
external intervention at bay need to concentrate their
attention and energies on internal reform.
Top Ten Myths about the Libya War
Juan Cole
August 22, 2011
http://www.juancole.com / Direct URL:
http://tinyurl.com/3us4kcs
The Libyan Revolution has largely succeeded, and this is a
moment of celebration, not only for Libyans but for a youth
generation in the Arab world that has pursued a political
opening across the region. The secret of the uprising's
final days of success lay in a popular revolt in the
working-class districts of the capital, which did most of
the hard work of throwing off the rule of secret police and
military cliques. It succeeded so well that when
revolutionary brigades entered the city from the west, many
encountered little or no resistance, and they walked right
into the center of the capital. Muammar Qaddafi was in
hiding as I went to press, and three of his sons were in
custody. Saif al-Islam Qaddafi had apparently been the de
facto ruler of the country in recent years, so his capture
signaled a checkmate. (Checkmate is a corruption of the
Persian "shah maat," the "king is confounded," since chess
came west from India via Iran). Checkmate.
The end game, wherein the people of Tripoli overthrew the
Qaddafis and joined the opposition Transitional National
Council, is the best case scenario that I had suggested was
the most likely denouement for the revolution. I have been
making this argument for some time, and it evoked a certain
amount of incredulity when I said it in a lecture in the
Netherlands in mid-June, but it has all along been my best
guess that things would end the way they have. I got it
right where others did not because my premises turned out
to be sounder, i.e., that Qaddafi had lost popular support
across the board and was in power only through main force.
Once enough of his heavy weapons capability was disrupted,
and his fuel and ammunition supplies blocked, the
underlying hostility of the common people to the regime
could again manifest itself, as it had in February. I was
moreover convinced that the generality of Libyans were
attracted by the revolution and by the idea of a political
opening, and that there was no great danger to national
unity here.
I do not mean to underestimate the challenges that still
lie ahead -- mopping up operations against regime loyalists,
reestablishing law and order in cities that have seen
popular revolutions, reconstituting police and the national
army, moving the Transitional National Council to Tripoli,
founding political parties, and building a new,
parliamentary regime. Even in much more institutionalized
and less clan-based societies such as Tunisia and Egypt,
these tasks have proved anything but easy. But it would be
wrong, in this moment of triumph for the Libyan Second
Republic, to dwell on the difficulties to come. Libyans
deserve a moment of exultation.
I have taken a lot of heat for my support of the revolution
and of the United Nations-authorized intervention by the
Arab League and NATO that kept it from being crushed. I
haven't taken nearly as much heat as the youth of Misrata
who fought off Qaddafi's tank barrages, though, so it is
OK. I hate war, having actually lived through one in
Lebanon, and I hate the idea of people being killed. My
critics who imagined me thrilling at NATO bombing raids
were just being cruel. But here I agree with President
Obama and his citation of Reinhold Niebuhr. You can't
protect all victims of mass murder everywhere all the time.
But where you can do some good, you should do it, even if
you cannot do all good. I mourn the deaths of all the
people who died in this revolution, especially since many
of the Qaddafi brigades were clearly coerced (they deserted
in large numbers as soon as they felt it safe). But it was
clear to me that Qaddafi was not a man to compromise, and
that his military machine would mow down the
revolutionaries if it were allowed to.
Moreover, those who question whether there were US
interests in Libya seem to me a little blind. The US has an
interest in there not being massacres of people for merely
exercising their right to free assembly. The US has an
interest in a lawful world order, and therefore in the
United Nations Security Council resolution demanding that
Libyans be protected from their murderous government. The
US has an interest in its NATO alliance, and NATO allies
France and Britain felt strongly about this intervention.
The US has a deep interest in the fate of Egypt, and what
happened in Libya would have affected Egypt (Qaddafi
allegedly had high Egyptian officials on his payroll).
Given the controversies about the revolution, it is
worthwhile reviewing the myths about the Libyan Revolution
that led so many observers to make so many fantastic or
just mistaken assertions about it.
1. Qaddafi was a progressive in his domestic policies.
While back in the 1970s, Qaddafi was probably more generous
in sharing around the oil wealth with the population,
buying tractors for farmers, etc., in the past couple of
decades that policy changed. He became vindictive against
tribes in the east and in the southwest that had crossed
him politically, depriving them of their fair share in the
country's resources. And in the past decade and a half,
extreme corruption and the rise of post-Soviet-style
oligarchs, including Qaddafi and his sons, have discouraged
investment and blighted the economy. Workers were strictly
controlled and unable to collectively bargain for
improvements in their conditions. There was much more
poverty and poor infrastructure in Libya than there should
have been in an oil state.
2. Qaddafi was a progressive in his foreign policy.
Again,
he traded for decades on positions, or postures, he took in
the 1970s. In contrast, in recent years he played a
sinister role in Africa, bankrolling brutal dictators and
helping foment ruinous wars. In 1996 the supposed champion
of the Palestinian cause expelled 30,000 stateless
Palestinians from the country. After he came in from the
cold, ending European and US sanctions, he began buddying
around with George W. Bush, Silvio Berlusconi and other
right wing figures. Berlusconi has even said that he
considered resigning as Italian prime minister once NATO
began its intervention, given his close personal
relationship to Qaddafi. Such a progressive.
3. It was only natural that Qaddafi sent his military
against the protesters and revolutionaries; any country
would have done the same.
No, it wouldn't, and this is the
argument of a moral cretin. In fact, the Tunisian officer
corps refused to fire on Tunisian crowds for dictator Zine
El Abidine Ben Ali, and the Egyptian officer corps refused
to fire on Egyptian crowds for Hosni Mubarak. The
willingness of the Libyan officer corps to visit macabre
violence on protesting crowds derived from the centrality
of the Qaddafi sons and cronies at the top of the military
hierarchy and from the lack of connection between the
people and the professional soldiers and mercenaries.
Deploying the military against non-combatants was a war
crime, and doing so in a widespread and systematic way was
a crime against humanity. Qaddafi and his sons will be
tried for this crime, which is not "perfectly natural."
4. There was a long stalemate in the fighting between the
revolutionaries and the Qaddafi military.
There was not.
This idea was fostered by the vantage point of many Western
observers, in Benghazi. It is true that there was a long
stalemate at Brega, which ended yesterday when the proQaddafi
troops there surrendered. But the two most active
fronts in the war were Misrata and its environs, and the
Western Mountain region. Misrata fought an epic,
Stalingrad-style, struggle of self-defense against
attacking Qaddafi armor and troops, finally proving
victorious with NATO help, and then they gradually fought
to the west toward Tripoli. The most dramatic battles and
advances were in the largely Berber Western Mountain
region, where, again, Qaddafi armored units relentlessly
shelled small towns and villages but were fought off (with
less help from NATO initially, which I think did not
recognize the importance of this theater). It was the
revolutionary volunteers from this region who eventually
took Zawiya, with the help of the people of Zawiya, last
Friday and who thereby cut Tripoli off from fuel and
ammunition coming from Tunisia and made the fall of the
capital possible. Any close observer of the war since April
has seen constant movement, first at Misrata and then in
the Western Mountains, and there was never an over-all
stalemate.
5. The Libyan Revolution was a civil war.
It was not, if by
that is meant a fight between two big groups within the
body politic. There was nothing like the vicious sectarian
civilian-on-civilian fighting in Baghdad in 2006. The
revolution began as peaceful public protests, and only when
the urban crowds were subjected to artillery, tank, mortar
and cluster bomb barrages did the revolutionaries begin
arming themselves. When fighting began, it was volunteer
combatants representing their city quarters taking on
trained regular army troops and mercenaries. That is a
revolution, not a civil war. Only in a few small pockets of
territory, such as Sirte and its environs, did pro-Qaddafi
civilians oppose the revolutionaries, but it would be wrong
to magnify a handful of skirmishes of that sort into a
civil war. Qaddafi's support was too limited, too thin, and
too centered in the professional military, to allow us to
speak of a civil war.
6. Libya is not a real country and could have been
partitioned between east and west.
Alexander Cockburn wrote, "It requites no great prescience to see that this will
all end up badly. Qaddafi's failure to collapse on
schedule is prompting increasing pressure to start a
ground war, since the NATO operation is, in terms of
prestige, like the banks Obama has bailed out, Too Big
to Fail. Libya will probably be balkanized."
I don't understand the propensity of Western analysts to
keep pronouncing nations in the global south "artificial"
and on the verge of splitting up. It is a kind of
Orientalism. All nations are artificial. Benedict Anderson
dates the nation-state to the late 1700s, and even if it
were a bit earlier, it is a new thing in history. Moreover,
most nation-states are multi-ethnic, and many longestablished
ones have sub-nationalisms that threaten their
unity. Thus, the Catalans and Basque are uneasy inside
Spain, the Scottish may bolt Britain any moment, etc., etc.
In contrast, Libya does not have any well-organized,
popular separatist movements. It does have tribal
divisions, but these are not the basis for nationalist
separatism, and tribal alliances and fissures are more
fluid than ethnicity (which is itself less fixed than
people assume). Everyone speaks Arabic, though for Berbers
it is the public language; Berbers were among the central
Libyan heroes of the revolution, and will be rewarded with
a more pluralist Libya. This generation of young Libyans,
who waged the revolution, have mostly been through state
schools and have a strong allegiance to the idea of Libya.
Throughout the revolution, the people of Benghazi insisted
that Tripoli was and would remain the capital. Westerners
looking for break-ups after dictatorships are fixated on
the Balkan events after 1989, but there most often isn't an
exact analogue to those in the contemporary Arab world.
7. There had to be NATO infantry brigades on the ground for
the revolution to succeed.
Everyone from Cockburn to Max
Boot (scary when those two agree) put forward this idea.
But there are not any foreign infantry brigades in Libya,
and there are unlikely to be any. Libyans are very
nationalistic and they made this clear from the beginning.
Likewise the Arab League. NATO had some intelligence assets
on the ground, but they were small in number, were
requested behind the scenes for liaison and spotting by the
revolutionaries, and did not amount to an invasion force.
The Libyan people never needed foreign ground brigades to
succeed in their revolution.
8. The United States led the charge to war.
There is no
evidence for this allegation whatsoever. When I asked Glenn
Greenwald whether a US refusal to join France and Britain
in a NATO united front might not have destroyed NATO, he
replied that NATO would never have gone forward unless the
US had plumped for the intervention in the first place. I
fear that answer was less fact-based and more doctrinaire
than we are accustomed to hearing from Mr. Greenwald, whose
research and analysis on domestic issues is generally
first-rate. As someone not a stranger to diplomatic
history, and who has actually heard briefings in Europe
from foreign ministries and officers of NATO members, I'm
offended at the glibness of an answer given with no more
substantiation than an idee fixe. The excellent McClatchy
wire service reported on the reasons for which then
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, the Pentagon, and Obama
himself were extremely reluctant to become involved in yet
another war in the Muslim world. It is obvious that the
French and the British led the charge on this intervention,
likely because they believed that a protracted struggle
over years between the opposition and Qaddafi in Libya
would radicalize it and give an opening to al-Qaeda and so
pose various threats to Europe. French President Nicolas
Sarkozy had been politically mauled, as well, by the offer
of his defense minister, Michèle Alliot-Marie, to send
French troops to assist Ben Ali in Tunisia (Alliot-Marie
had been Ben Ali's guest on fancy vacations), and may have
wanted to restore traditional French cachet in the Arab
world as well as to look decisive to his electorate.
Whatever Western Europe's motivations, they were the
decisive ones, and the Obama administration clearly came
along as a junior partner (something Sen. John McCain is
complaining bitterly about).
9. Qaddafi would not have killed or imprisoned large
numbers of dissidents in Benghazi, Derna, al-Bayda and
Tobruk if he had been allowed to pursue his March
Blitzkrieg toward the eastern cities that had defied him.
But we have real-world examples of how he would have
behaved, in Zawiya, Tawargha, Misrata and elsewhere. His
indiscriminate shelling of Misrata had already killed
between 1000 and 2000 by last April,, and it continued all
summer. At least one Qaddafi mass grave with 150 bodies in
it has been discovered. And the full story of the horrors
in Zawiya and elsewhere in the west has yet to emerge, but
it will not be pretty. The opposition claims Qaddafi's
forces killed tens of thousands. Public health studies may
eventually settle this issue, but we know definitively what
Qaddafi was capable of.
10. This was a war for Libya's oil.
That is daft. Libya was
already integrated into the international oil markets, and
had done billions of deals with BP, ENI, etc., etc. None of
those companies would have wanted to endanger their
contracts by getting rid of the ruler who had signed them.
They had often already had the trauma of having to compete
for post-war Iraqi contracts, a process in which many did
less well than they would have liked. ENI's profits were
hurt by the Libyan revolution, as were those of Total SA.
and Repsol. Moreover, taking Libyan oil off the market
through a NATO military intervention could have been
foreseen to put up oil prices, which no Western elected
leader would have wanted to see, especially Barack Obama,
with the danger that a spike in energy prices could prolong
the economic doldrums. An economic argument for imperialism
is fine if it makes sense, but this one does not, and there
is no good evidence for it (that Qaddafi was erratic is not
enough), and is therefore just a conspiracy theory.
AfricaFocus Bulletin is an independent electronic
publication providing reposted commentary and analysis on
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international policies. AfricaFocus Bulletin is edited by
William Minter.
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