More than two years on since the “revolution” of 16 February 2011, the security crisis in Libya is exacerbating by the day, threatening an implosion charged with potential and realistic risks to the geopolitical unity of the Arab North African country, turning this crisis into a national and existential one. Obviously, the status quo is unsustainable. “Libya is imploding two years after the former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was captured and killed on 20 October,” Patrick Cockburn wrote in the British Independent on 10 October. Libya's oil industry has become the target of violent attacks and civil protests, closing export terminals in the east and west and/or creating an oil black market. “Security guards” at the country's main ports are on strike and selling oil independently in spite of a 67 per cent hike in pay for employees of the state oil sector, 31 October. Libyan Oil Minister Abdel-Bari Ali Al-Arousi, told The Financial Times on 29 April that disruptions to production and exports cost the country about $1 billion over the previous five months alone. On 11 November, Reuters reported that protesters shut Libya's gas export pipeline to Italy, its only customer, in the Mellitah complex, some 100 kilometres west of Tripoli, after shutting down oil exports from there as well. A day earlier, Reuters reported that the separatist self-declared autonomous Cyrenaica government set up a regional firm called the “Libya Oil and Gas Corp” to sell oil independently after seizing several ports in the east of the country, where Libya's two most important oil ports — Sidra and Ras Lanuf — were blockaded by protesters. Libya is Europe's single largest oil supplier. Cutting Libyan oil and gas supplies to Europe on the eve of a winter that weather forecasts predict to be very cold would be an excellent pretext for inviting European military intervention in the country, which seems the only option left for the transitional government of Prime Minister Ali Zeidan that ran out of other means to survive. It is noteworthy here that while the UN Support Mission in Libya can obviously “support” nothing, France, Italy, the UK and the US, who spearheaded the NATO campaign to topple the former ruling regime, in a joint statement 8 November, expressed their concern “at the instability in Libya and the threat that [it] poses to the successful achievement of the democratic transition”, and reiterated their “support to the elected political institutions” — ie to Zeidan's government. Ironically, Zeidan on 10 November warned his compatriots of a possible “intervention of foreign occupation forces” in order to protect civilians under Chapter VII of the UN Charter because “the international community cannot tolerate a state in the middle of the Mediterranean that is a source of violence, terrorism and murder,” which was the same pretext for the NATO military intervention that contributed to mainly — if not created — the security crisis in the first place by destroying the military and police infrastructure of the central government and turning the country practically into a sponsor of regional terrorism in general and an exporter of arms and “jihadists” to Syria in particular. Zeidan's warning of foreign “intervention” could also be interpreted as an implicit threat to ask for it, to help rein in the security crisis lest it boils over to an implosion of the country. Forbes on 30 August reported that Libya's “energy protection” was failing and quoted premier Zeidan as saying that his government would impose “order by force” when it came to protecting the oil and gas industry, expanding the Petroleum Facility Guards (PFG) to 18,000 members. Months on, his efforts and threats failed to deter the targeting of pipelines, refineries and export terminals. His renewed threats since early September to “bomb from the air and the sea” any oil tanker entering Libya's territorial waters illegally, trying to pick up illicit Libyan oil, have proved hollow and without teeth. Libya is the second largest oil producer in Africa and the continent's fourth largest natural gas supplier and already dominates the Southern Mediterranean's petroleum sector. According to the Libyan National Oil Corporation (NOC), more than 50 international oil companies were already present in the Libya on the eve of the “revolution”. The country's potential is more promising: Austria's OMV said 21 October it had struck oil in Libya in its first new discovery since 2011. On 18 October, CNBC.com quoted Paolo Scaroni, CEO of the Italian oil and gas firm ENI, which is Libya's largest foreign partner, as saying: “Everyone is going to be wealthy” in Libya, citing statistics of what could be: “Five million people and two million barrels of oil (per day), which means that this country can be a paradise, and I am doubtful that Libyans will not catch this opportunity of becoming the new Abu Dhabi, or the new Qatar or the new Kuwait.” LIBYAN COPY OF IRAQ'S “GREEN ZONE”: Yet Libyans seem determined to miss “this opportunity”. “Revolutionary” Libya, reminiscent of the US-engineered “democratic” Iraq some 10 years after the US invasion, is still unable to offer basic services to its citizens. Real unemployment is estimated at over 30 per cent. The economy has stalled and frustration is growing. Gone are the welfare days of Gaddafi's state when young families could get a house with benefits for free, people's medication and treatment were paid for by the state, and free education was made available to everyone. About one million supporters of the Gaddafi regime remain internally displaced; hundreds of thousands more fled for their lives abroad. Remnants of the destroyed institutional infrastructure of law, order and security are hardly capable of protecting the symbolic central government in Tripoli, reminiscent of its Iraqi counterpart, which is still besieged in the so-called “Green Zone” in Baghdad. Late last October Libya's central bank was robbed of $55 million in a broad daylight heist. More than 100 senior military and police commanders have been assassinated. “Libya isn't just at a crossroads. We are at a roundabout. We keep driving round in circles without knowing where to get off,” Libyan Minister of Economy Alikilani Al-Jazisaid at a conference in London in September, quoted by The Australian, 14 October. On 30 August, the Swiss-based group Petromatrix said: “We are currently witnessing the collapse of the state in Libya, and the country is getting closer to local wars for oil revenues.” Four days later Patrick Cockburn reported in British Independent that “Libyans are increasingly at the mercy of militias” and that “Government authority is disintegrating in all parts of the country.” Ironically, an estimated one-quarter of a million heavily armed militiamen, who are the main obstacle to creating and empowering a central government, are on the government payroll. Writing in The Tripoli Post on 31 October, Karen Dabrowska said that, “Local notables, tribal groups, Islamists and militias are all vying to keep the centre from extending its authority to their fiefdoms and this explains why disparate social groupings can only unite temporarily to prevent the centre from gaining power over them.” It “goes without saying that the post-Muammar Gaddafi Libya is purely a failed state” governed by militia, Adfer Rashid Shah of the Jamia Millia Islamia, Central University in New Delhi, wrote 15 October. Following the heavy infighting in the Libyan capital 7 November, Italian Foreign Minister Emma Bonino told newspaper La Republicca that the country was “absolutely out of control” and the situation is worsening, hinting that Italian oil and gas firm ENI was prepared to close its oil wells. Zeidan's abduction from his Tripoli's Corinthia Hotel on 10 October, which the British Economist described as “the shortest coup,” highlighted the country's deteriorating security crisis. It was interpreted as a “reprisal” for the kidnapping five days earlier of Abu Anas Al-Libi by US Special Forces, on suspicion of links with Al-Qaeda, an act which exposed the inability of the central government to cooperate and coordinate with its American “ally” in his arrest, on the one hand, and on the other exposed its failure in protecting Libya's sovereignty against a flagrant US violation of the same. In July, Zeidan threatened that his government may have to “use force” in Benghazi, the cradle of the “revolution” and the current focus of insecurity, tribalism, separatism, Islamist rebels, decentralisation of government, assassination of regular army and security officers and attacks on foreign diplomatic missions who mostly closed their consulates in Libya's second largest city, where the US ambassador was killed in September last year. Ahead of his visit to the eastern city Monday, when he promised reinforcements and logistical support to the security forces there, Zeidan launched a show of force into the city the previous Friday with hundreds of armoured troop carriers and army trucks mounted with guns. But Zeidan's threat to “use force” will inevitably be counterproductive, not only because his government's lack of “force” would compromise his credibility, but because, within the current balance of power between his government and the militias, it will make the security situation worse if it does not ignite a civil war. Zeidan said his government would give the “revolutionaries” who have turned into rival and vying militias and warlords until 31 December to join the regular army and police or they will be cut from the government payroll — that is, if his coffers could afford to sustain their payroll if they accepted, and if they did not accept his offer it will be another reason for more mutiny and rebellion. More likely the government payroll may not be rolling because the government is facing a budget crisis — “from next or the following month, there could be a problem covering expenditure” according to Zeidan himself — as the security crisis has brought oil production to a standstill or out of its control because the “militia groups are behaving like terrorists, using control over oil as political leverage to extract concessions,” according to Elizabeth Stephens, head of political risk at insurers Jardine Lloyd Thompson, quoted by the British Telegraph, 29 August. An imminent constitutional crisis could create a power vacuum that in turn would worsen the security crisis. Published by RT on 7 November, analyst Nile Bowie wrote: “In accordance with the transitional roadmap adopted by the transitional government in May 2011, the mandate of the current government in Tripoli is set to expire 8 February 2014. Failure to implement a new constitution by then would either force Tripoli into extending its mandate — a move which is seen as highly unpopular — or a potential power vacuum scenario which could set off a chain of events that could lead to a civil war or dissolution.” PENTAGON PLANS NO HELP: Short of Western “boots on the ground”, it is doubtful that Zeidan's government will survive. The US administration of President Barack Obama was repeatedly on record against any US boots on the ground in the Middle East. With the exception of France, which might be ready for the appropriate price to repeat its recent limited and temporary military intervention in Mali, Europe seems against it too. Zeidan, with less than three months remaining in office, seems to be relying on the Pentagon's plans to arm and train, through “AFRICOM”, a new Libyan army, called “a general purpose force.” But “the case of a separate and underreported US effort to train a small Libyan counterterrorism unit inside Libya earlier this year is instructive,” Frederic Wehrey wrote recently in Foreign Affairs, adding: “The absence of clear lines of authority — nearly inevitable given Libya's fragmented security sector — meant that the force's capabilities could just have easily ended up being used against political enemies as against terrorists. In August, militias launched a pre-dawn raid on the training camp that was not well guarded. There were no US soldiers at the camp, but the militia took a great deal of US military equipment from the site, some of it sensitive. The US decided to abort the programme and the US forces supposedly went home.” The obvious alternative to Zeidan's Western supported government would be a stateless society governed by militia warlords, while the survival of his government promises more of the same. At the official end of the NATO war for regime change in Libya on 31 October 2011, US President Obama proclaimed from the White House Rose Garden that this event signalled the advent of “a new and democratic Libya”. But two years later, Libya is devolving to pre-Gaddafi, old undemocratic tribal and ethnic rivalries with the added value of exclusionist terrorist religious fundamentalism wearing the mantle of Islamist jihad. In the wake of Gaddafi's death on 20 October, a Saudi Arabian Arab News editorial said: “The point about Gaddafi's death is that it makes the next transition stage that much easier, that much safer. As long as he remained at large, he would have been in a position to destabilise the country.” Two years after Gaddafi's death, we can say the Saudi daily's prediction was plain wrong. The writer is a veteran Arab journalist based in Birzeit in the West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories.
