France calls for another intervention in Libya

Once again there is international pressure for a new intervention in Libya as competing militias continue to clash and competing governments exist in Tobruk and Tripoli.

The "legitimate" government resulting from the elections last June has been forced to locate in the far eastern city of Tobruk where it is out of reach of Islamist militias and backers of the GNC-appointed government in Tripoli the capital. The Tobruk government is said to be firmly anti-Islamist and to be loosely allied with the CIA-linked general Khalifa Haftar. Haftar and his allies have been driven out of most of his stronghold Benghazi, where he we largely responsible for the present conflict when he attacked two Islamist bases in Benghazi to launch his Operation Dignity. Part of this operation involved his allies the Zintan brigades attacking and burning the elected parliament and kidnapping Islamist legislators and officials. Nevertheless the group continued to be hired to protect the International Airport in Tripoli until eventually rival Islamist militia from Misrata, associated with Libyan Dawn, won control and drove them out of Tripoli entirely. There are still clashes near the city.
 The long battle also involved mystery planes making bombing raids several nights on positions of the Islamist militias. The US at first accused the UAE and Egypt of being involved in the attacks but later decided to retract their accusations. Haftar still controls an air base on the outskirts of Benghazi and has launched bombing attacks on Islamist bases in Benghazi from there.The government in Tobruk has little power and has lost control of many "ministries, institutions, and state bodies in the capital Tripoli". The Tobruk government has re-appointed former prime minister Abdullah al-Thinni as the prime minister.
With Islamist-linked groups on the ascendancy in Libya the west is suddenly becoming concerned although there was no similar panic when the elected parliament was burned and legislators kidnapped by Haftar allies. Now all of a sudden we have the possibility of a failed state and as in Egypt no doubt even Islamists who had been elected will suddenly become terrorists. Militia groups such as that from Misrata who played a key role in defeating Gadaffi will now be part of the terrorist problem that the international community must help the friendly local CIA-linked Haftar to solve.
 The mysterious bombings in Tripoli were the first obvious sign of foreign intervention by countries such as Egypt and the UAE who are enemies of the Muslim Brotherhood and any Islamists who do not support their rule. Conservative Salafists who support the government are quite acceptable. Now it seems that the west is becoming involved too. France, itself a country with long colonial experience in Africa has taken the lead. French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian sounded the alarm about the seriousness of the situation in Libya and urged the international community to take action in Libya since it was becoming the "hub for terrorist groups". Speaking to the French daily Le Figaro Le Drian said: "We need to act in Libya and mobilise the international community. Today, I am sounding the alarm about the seriousness of the situation in Libya. The south is a sort of hub for terrorist groups where they come to resupply - including with weapons - and reorganise, In the north, the political and economic centres of the country are now at risk from falling under jihadist control. And Libya is the gateway both to Europe and the Sahara."
Le Drian said that French forces in Mali could move up to the Libyan border. Note that Le Drian has nothing to say about General Haftar or the activities of his militia and allies. The pro-Haftar militia are now called "nationalists" in articles. Le Drian is to discuss the Libyan situation with other European defense ministers in Italy on September 10. Earlier French President Francois Hollande called on the UN to provide special support for authorities in Libya. By "authorities" he means the pro-Haftar representatives holed up in Tobruk. Hollande did not say what sort of support he had in mind. There are already signs that France is up to neo-colonial actions in northern Mali.
Egypt is very much concerned that Islamists opposed to his crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood should gain control in Libya and perhaps use oil funds to support opposition to the government of el-Sisi. However, Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institute sees the threat as mostly ideological: "It is not a very tangible threat to Egyptian security directly, although Libya could find ways to boost the Brotherhood in Egypt by destabilizing the border in some way or by providing refuge for Egyptian Islamists. The paranoia is not very tied to the realities of the threat. I think that the regime doesn't see the Egyptian Brotherhood as just the Egyptian Brotherhood, but as one component in a regional conspiracy against Egypt and the regional order that Egypt supports. We can't understand what Egypt did in Libya without understanding the broader divide in the Middle East between Islamists and anti-Islamists. Libya has become the site of a charged proxy battle because of this."
The conflict is not really between Islamists and anti-Islamists but between Islamists who oppose Egypt and many of the Gulf monarchies and those who do not. These countries are all themselves Islamist and in the case of Saudi Arabia quite conservative in its Islamism. Qatar and Turkey are not opposed to the Brotherhood.
Hamid claims that Egypt will continue to support General Haftar: "It is very clear that Egypt will continue to support Hiftar in one degree or another. I have trouble seeing the Sisi regime just saying, 'We gave it a shot, there's not a lot more we can do.' The proxy battle will continue, it's just a question of how willing Egypt is to get involved." Egyptian leaders have said that if the Council of Deputies in Tobruk asks for foreign military intervention, Egypt would participate as part of a broad coalition if it included other countries in the region. Perhaps other countries could include France and other old European colonial powers such as Britain, and Italy. Even the US could become involved. After all Haftar is a US citizen who lived in the US for decades. The Republicans are already howling at Obama for his neglect of LIbya and not immediately intervening.

Causes of Somalia "Chaos"

I was led to this article by a libertarian blog that seemed to favor the stateless situation in Somalia or at least the blog argued that the international community wanted a state so that there could be taxation and hence payment of Somalia's long oustanding loans. Well that could very well be but I think that it is more likely that the US and others want a secure state so that they can put down Islamists and make Somalia secure for foreign investment in oil etc. The article shows that many of the business people actually favored the Islamist govt. Obviously it was Ethiopia that attacked Somalia not vice versa--or rather invaded by invitation of the provisional govt.
Mainstream commentators haven't a clue about the term "anarchy". They just use it as a general boo word. Anarchism has a long and venerable history as a political and social theory.

New York Times

April 25, 2007
Profiteers in Somalia Are Quick to Fuel Anarchy
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
GALKAYO, Somalia — Beyond clan rivalry and Islamic fervor, an entirely different motive is helping fuel the chaos in Somalia: profit.

A whole class of opportunists — from squatter landlords to teenage gunmen for hire to vendors of out-of-date baby formula — have been feeding off the anarchy in Somalia for so long that they refuse to let go.

They do not pay taxes, their businesses are totally unregulated and they have skills that are not necessarily geared toward a peaceful society.

In the past few weeks, some Western security officials say, these profiteers have been teaming up with clan fighters and radical Islamists to bring down Somalia’s transitional government, which is the country’s 14th attempt at organizing a central authority and ending the free-for-all of the past 16 years.

They are attacking government troops, smuggling in arms and using their business savvy to raise money for the insurgency. And they are surprisingly open about it.

Omar Hussein Ahmed, an olive oil exporter in Mogadishu, the capital, said he and a group of fellow traders recently bought some missiles to shoot at government soldiers.

“Taxes are annoying,” he explained.

Maxamuud Nuur Muradeeste, a squatter landlord who makes a few hundred dollars a year renting out rooms in the former Ministry of Minerals and Water, said he recently invited insurgents to stash weapons on “his” property. He will do whatever it takes, he said, to thwart the government’s plan to reclaim thousands of pieces of public property.

“If this government survives, how will I?” Mr. Muradeeste said.

Layer this problem on top of Somalia’s sticky clan issues, its poverty and its nomadic culture, and it is no wonder that the transitional government seems to be overwhelmed by the same raw antigovernment defiance that has torpedoed earlier attempts at stabilizing the country.

Granted, many of the transitional leaders acknowledge that they have made mistakes and that they have not played the clan politics as deftly as they could have. But they believe that there are some Somalis — actually, many Somalis — who will never go along with any program.

“Even if we turned Mogadishu into Houston, there would still be people resisting us,” said Abdirizak Adam Hassan, chief of staff for Somalia’s transitional president, Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed. “I’m talking about the guys bringing in expired medicine, selling arms, harboring terrorists. They don’t have a clan name. They’re a congregation of people whose best interests are served by no government.”

In the past month, the resistance has intensified and more than 1,000 people have been killed or wounded as the country has sunk into its deepest crisis since the famine days of the early 1990s.

Most of the victims are civilians, like Amina Abdullahi, who recently fled Mogadishu with two small children holding her hands and a baby tied to her back.

“I don’t understand why this is such a problem,” she said. “If people don’t like this government, can’t they wait until there is an election and vote them out?”

American diplomats have mostly shied away from Somalia since the infamous “Black Hawk Down” episode in 1993 when Somali militiamen shot down two American helicopters and killed 18 United States soldiers. But now the Americans are involved again, driven by a counterterrorism agenda and armed with a pledge of $100 million to rebuild the country.

And it is exactly this kind of hefty support that is fueling the resistance’s urgency, because the opportunists sense that this transitional government, more than any other, poses the biggest threat yet to the gravy days of anarchy.

Somalis are legendary individualists, and when the central government imploded in 1991, people quickly devised ways to fend for themselves.

Businessmen opened their own hospitals, schools, telephone companies and even privatized mail services. Men who were able to muster private armies, often former military officers, seized the biggest prizes: abandoned government property, like ports and airfields, which could generate as much as $40,000 a day. They became the warlords. Many trafficked in guns and drugs and taxed their fellow Somalis.

Beneath the warlords were clan-based networks of thousands of people — adolescent enforcers, stevedores, clerks, truck drivers and their families — all tied into the chaos economy. Ditto for the freelance landlords and duty-free importers.

Over the years, prominent members of the Hawiye clan, Mogadishu’s biggest, have tried to cobble together a government and end this system. But they have failed every time. Though Somalia is notoriously fragmented between dozens of rival clans and subclans, and has been that way for centuries, clans alone did not seem to be the problem.

“It was the opportunists who didn’t see a role for themselves in the future,” said Mohammed Abdi Balle, an elder here in Galkayo, a city about 450 miles north of Mogadishu.

Not all opportunists had the same agenda. Many in the business community became fed up with paying protection fees to the warlords and their countless middle-men.

Business leaders then backed a grass-roots Islamist movement that drove the warlords out of Mogadishu last summer and brought peace to the city for the first time in 15 years.

The Islamists seemed to be the perfect solution for the businessmen. They delivered stability, which was good for most business, but they did not confiscate property or levy heavy taxes. They called themselves an administration, not a government.

“Our best days were under them,” said Abdi Ali Jama, who owns an electrical supply shop in Mogadishu.

But then a radical wing took over, and the Islamists declared war on Ethiopia, which commands one of the mightiest armies in Africa. The Ethiopians, with covert American help, crushed the Islamist army in December and bolstered the authority of Somalia’s transitional government in the capital.

Many residents initially welcomed the transitional government. But then it made some questionable calls that cut across clan and business lines. It abruptly closed ports and took over airfields belonging to Hawiye businessmen, denying them revenue they had been accustomed to receiving for years. Many Somalis began to worry that the transitional government, which includes elders from all of Somalia’s clans, was being pushed around by the Darod, the clan of the transitional president and a historic rival to the Hawiye.

At first, just a few Hawiye sub-clans — mainly those connected to the Islamists — took up arms. But as the government has moved to curtail the profiteering, business leaders say that more and more clans are embracing the rebel cause.

For many Abgal, an influential subclan of the Hawiye, the last straw came in mid-March when the government raised port taxes by 300 percent. Mr. Ahmed, the olive oil exporter and an Abgal, said that after that, there was a mass Abgal defection to the insurgency.

“The government is trying to destroy business as we know it,” he said.

Despite attempts at a cease-fire between insurgents and government forces, the violence has raged virtually unabated in Mogadishu.

And once again, the opportunists have stepped in. In some areas, displaced people are forced to pay a “shade tax” to local residents for resting under their trees.

Mohammed Ibrahim and Yuusuf Maxamuud contributed reporting from Mogadishu, Somalia.


Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company