Charlotte Leslie is Director of the Conservative Middle East Council, former MP for Bristol North West and a Global Ambassador of President Zelensky’s ‘Grain from Ukraine’ initiative. She writes in a personal capacity.
It was in 2011, when the so-called Arab Spring was in full force, that David Cameron asked Parliament to make an unenviable decision: whether or not to commence military action in Libya.
The choice was between allowing the abominable slaughter of the people of Benghazi by Muammar Gaddafi’s authoritarian regime, or intervening and risking a re-run of Iraq post-Sadam Hussein: slaughter, misery and poverty at the hands of a violent dictator, replaced by slaughter, misery, poverty and instability at the hands of the less-identifiable forces of chaos.
I am not proud to admit that faced with such a hard choice, I abstained. I could not vote against intervention to save a population from violent slaughter. But neither did I feel able to vote for what was initially pitched as a limited life-saving intervention, but which I felt certain would morph into a well-intentioned drive for regime-change.
But a drive for change based on scant understanding as to the tribal, tripartite nature of Libya, and no plan as to what was to follow, except optimism that Libya could easily be rebuilt into a democracy which worked for the people, bolstered by some of the West’s most reassuring abstract nouns.
The decision was taken for Britain to intervene. And the rest, as the popular podcasts would say, is both politics and history. Libya did not settle into a functioning democracy following the fall of its violent and dangerous tyrant. Predictably, tribalism and chaos ensued.
Islamism grew, and migrant crossings from Libya rocketed as criminal gangs thrived in the chaos. The West’s abstract nouns proved remarkably ineffectual at state-building. By that time, British foreign policy focus had moved on anyway.
Today in Libya, corruption is endemic. It is a country torn between military strongmen in the east who have seized territory, and politicians who have clung on to power. The situation in Libya has not only been an in-country issue. It has had severe ramifications for regional neighbours such as Mali and Sudan to Egypt, and the criminal industry of migrant trafficking has been a defining feature of European politics since 2011.
Now the chaos and corruption in Libya is starting to destabilise oil markets and the international order too.
Currently the U.N.-backed government under Abdul Debeibeh holds Tripoli, the capital, in the west. This is opposed by General Haftar, a warlord, and his sons who now hold much of the eastern part of the country and have the backing of Russia. A fragile truce has existed since 2020, when Haftar tried and failed to take Tripoli. Libya’s expanding dysfunction threatens a new civil war.
Only this month have we seen the forced closure of El Sharara, Libya’s largest oil field, by Haftar’s so-called Libyan National Army. This not only took offline a vital Libyan asset but also demonstrated the weakness of the Tripoli government to respond to these military threats to Libya’s economy. These weaknesses have now been further exposed as most of the nation’s oil fields are now under the control of Haftar’s forces, shutting off key finances relied upon by the Tripoli government for its survival, and skewing world markets.
The Tripoli government has responded not with a well-organised, unified counter-offensive, but by political infighting to protect positions and remove perceived internal opposition. The result is a precarious state of affairs.
Underpinning the situation is the National Oil Corporation (NOC) under Ferhat Bengdara, who has faced repeated allegations of corruption in the handling of the nation’s oil supplies. Reversing his predecessor’s dogged effort to introduce accountability and transparency into the sector, Bengdara’s current ‘free for all’ within the NOC exists in a climate of impunity, where Bengdara can twist the NOC’s finances to his private bidding.
This competition for coercive control of Libya’s financial institutions is destabilising the country at an alarming pace. The US Africa Command General Hadley met this week with Haftar to build avenues of further diplomacy with the US, which may have been focused on finding ways forward, but did little to improve morale, unity and political authority in Tripoli.
The lack of determined, ongoing, realist diplomatic engagement and support from western nations since our intervention in 2011 has resulted in a Libya torn in two, with corruption, criminality and violence uniting the elites from both sides. So too have states hostile to the West seized the opportunity.
A lot has happened since 2011 and Haftar’s subsequent bid for power. Just as it did in Syria in 2013, Russia saw a gap in the West’s determination, direction and attention and capitalised. Now Russia unequivocally has its man in Libya – General Haftar. It is not clear that the same can be said of the West, and the Government it supports in Tripoli.
“The West broke it, but they didn’t stick around to fix it”, is the view I hear most often from the region when the issue of Libya is raised. Not only is this bad for our international reputation, it is bad for our own self-interest.
It is bad for competing to establish powerful, reliable, allies in the country to compete with Russia’s influence, and bad in building the ability and credibility to help tackle the toxic corruption that blights the lives not only of the Libyan people but is now overspilling into global oil markets and global politics, at a time when the world can least afford it.
Charlotte Leslie is Director of the Conservative Middle East Council, former MP for Bristol North West and a Global Ambassador of President Zelensky’s ‘Grain from Ukraine’ initiative. She writes in a personal capacity.
It was in 2011, when the so-called Arab Spring was in full force, that David Cameron asked Parliament to make an unenviable decision: whether or not to commence military action in Libya.
The choice was between allowing the abominable slaughter of the people of Benghazi by Muammar Gaddafi’s authoritarian regime, or intervening and risking a re-run of Iraq post-Sadam Hussein: slaughter, misery and poverty at the hands of a violent dictator, replaced by slaughter, misery, poverty and instability at the hands of the less-identifiable forces of chaos.
I am not proud to admit that faced with such a hard choice, I abstained. I could not vote against intervention to save a population from violent slaughter. But neither did I feel able to vote for what was initially pitched as a limited life-saving intervention, but which I felt certain would morph into a well-intentioned drive for regime-change.
But a drive for change based on scant understanding as to the tribal, tripartite nature of Libya, and no plan as to what was to follow, except optimism that Libya could easily be rebuilt into a democracy which worked for the people, bolstered by some of the West’s most reassuring abstract nouns.
The decision was taken for Britain to intervene. And the rest, as the popular podcasts would say, is both politics and history. Libya did not settle into a functioning democracy following the fall of its violent and dangerous tyrant. Predictably, tribalism and chaos ensued.
Islamism grew, and migrant crossings from Libya rocketed as criminal gangs thrived in the chaos. The West’s abstract nouns proved remarkably ineffectual at state-building. By that time, British foreign policy focus had moved on anyway.
Today in Libya, corruption is endemic. It is a country torn between military strongmen in the east who have seized territory, and politicians who have clung on to power. The situation in Libya has not only been an in-country issue. It has had severe ramifications for regional neighbours such as Mali and Sudan to Egypt, and the criminal industry of migrant trafficking has been a defining feature of European politics since 2011.
Now the chaos and corruption in Libya is starting to destabilise oil markets and the international order too.
Currently the U.N.-backed government under Abdul Debeibeh holds Tripoli, the capital, in the west. This is opposed by General Haftar, a warlord, and his sons who now hold much of the eastern part of the country and have the backing of Russia. A fragile truce has existed since 2020, when Haftar tried and failed to take Tripoli. Libya’s expanding dysfunction threatens a new civil war.
Only this month have we seen the forced closure of El Sharara, Libya’s largest oil field, by Haftar’s so-called Libyan National Army. This not only took offline a vital Libyan asset but also demonstrated the weakness of the Tripoli government to respond to these military threats to Libya’s economy. These weaknesses have now been further exposed as most of the nation’s oil fields are now under the control of Haftar’s forces, shutting off key finances relied upon by the Tripoli government for its survival, and skewing world markets.
The Tripoli government has responded not with a well-organised, unified counter-offensive, but by political infighting to protect positions and remove perceived internal opposition. The result is a precarious state of affairs.
Underpinning the situation is the National Oil Corporation (NOC) under Ferhat Bengdara, who has faced repeated allegations of corruption in the handling of the nation’s oil supplies. Reversing his predecessor’s dogged effort to introduce accountability and transparency into the sector, Bengdara’s current ‘free for all’ within the NOC exists in a climate of impunity, where Bengdara can twist the NOC’s finances to his private bidding.
This competition for coercive control of Libya’s financial institutions is destabilising the country at an alarming pace. The US Africa Command General Hadley met this week with Haftar to build avenues of further diplomacy with the US, which may have been focused on finding ways forward, but did little to improve morale, unity and political authority in Tripoli.
The lack of determined, ongoing, realist diplomatic engagement and support from western nations since our intervention in 2011 has resulted in a Libya torn in two, with corruption, criminality and violence uniting the elites from both sides. So too have states hostile to the West seized the opportunity.
A lot has happened since 2011 and Haftar’s subsequent bid for power. Just as it did in Syria in 2013, Russia saw a gap in the West’s determination, direction and attention and capitalised. Now Russia unequivocally has its man in Libya – General Haftar. It is not clear that the same can be said of the West, and the Government it supports in Tripoli.
“The West broke it, but they didn’t stick around to fix it”, is the view I hear most often from the region when the issue of Libya is raised. Not only is this bad for our international reputation, it is bad for our own self-interest.
It is bad for competing to establish powerful, reliable, allies in the country to compete with Russia’s influence, and bad in building the ability and credibility to help tackle the toxic corruption that blights the lives not only of the Libyan people but is now overspilling into global oil markets and global politics, at a time when the world can least afford it.