In Libya, the fragility of a chiaroscuro peace

2023-06-12 20:00:05

Lhe Libya hardly makes international headlines anymore. An apparent stability, internal fractures that are difficult to read, crises elsewhere that are otherwise burning: Tripoli and Benghazi no longer interest, even tire. It is not really peace as illustrated by the recent incidents in Tripolitania (West). Nor is it war. No trace of a frontal clash between two politico-military coalitions encouraged from abroad, as was the case during the civil war in the summer of 2014 or the “Battle of Tripoli” in 2019-2020.

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Neither war nor peace: Libya lives in the chiaroscuro, the hybrid, the precarious arrangement and the wobbly compromise. Not chaotic enough to urgently convene an international summit. But too fragile not to worry. An oil and gas giant where foreign armed forces are encysted (the Turks in the West and the Russian paramilitaries of Wagner in the East and the South) while on its borders Sudan and the Sahel are ablaze, this which is not reassuring. The risk of relapse could be neutralized by an institutional framework perceived as legitimate by the population. However, this framework is – always – lacking.

Everyone gets along with it, however, including an international community tempted to see in the current fog a second best to past convulsions. After all, the ceasefire signed in October 2020 between the rival camps of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica (East) still holds. And the oil has been flowing again since the reopening in summer 2022 of hydrocarbon sites, closed two and a half years earlier by the forces of Marshal Khalifa Haftar, the “strong man” of Cyrenaica. The revenues drawn from black gold make it possible to dilute many tensions, in particular the resentment of eastern Libya in the face of a redistribution of the manna traditionally considered too favorable to the West.

A deceptive double appeasement

Forget these tensions. It’s time for business combining interests that were antagonistic yesterday. THE deals sealed between, on the one hand, Haftar and his family in Benghazi and, on the other, Abdel Hamid Dbeibah, the head of the government of national unity sitting in Tripoli, perfectly illustrate this concord by the racketeering. Suffice to say that the East-West divide, a too convenient key to reading the Libyan conflict, has lost its relevance. It is demolished by the ambient transactional frenzy. The skirmishes now deport instead inside each camp.

The front of the foreign sponsors offers the same impression of calm. The previous schism between the Turkey-Qatar tandem, sponsor of Tripolitania, and the United Arab Emirates-Saudi Arabia-Egypt axis, mentor of Cyrenaica, has been partially resolved, reducing by the same amount the external food for the conflict. Each opens up its strategic investments. The Turks established in western Libya are beginning to gain a foothold economically in the east. And the familiar Emiratis of the East are opening up to the West. These new transversal links erode the belligerent logic of blocks.

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