Is Libya heading for a break-up?
In the News
| 06-11-2014
Ever since the end of the Gaddafi era in 2011, the question of whether Libya might split into multiple mini-states has never been far from discussions about the country's long-term future.
It has come into even sharper focus over the past few months, with the emergence of a self-appointed government in Tripoli in direct rivalry with the House of Representatives in north-east Libya, which backs the government of Abdullah al-Thanay.
Both appear to control substantial armed forces, are trying to win foreign support, hold a number of important assets, and now even have rival news agencies – each with the same name.
And, although it had only just been announced at the time of writing, the ruling of the Tripoli-based Supreme Court that the House of Representatives is "illegal" may simply encourage the Tobruq government to set up its own legal authority.
Could this be the birth of two (or more) separate states?
The short answer is that we don’t know yet. Libya’s post-revolution trajectory has so far been nothing if not unpredictable, volatile and surprising; only the brave or foolish would make concrete forecasts about what could happen next.
The long answer is that it depends on various overlapping factors and how they play out in the months and years ahead.
Below is a simplified overview of some of those issues.
Military power
The total failure to secure Libya’s enormous arms supplies during and after the 2011 conflict has led to widespread militarisation and the emergence of hundreds of armed groups.
Their respective capabilities and allegiances are hard to analyse, and military experts will judge this better than the Libya Monitor, but it seems clear, at least for the moment, that no single force has the ability to take control of the whole country, or even a distinct region.
That augurs towards two things: firstly, more fighting but no overall military solution, and secondly, the likelihood of a highly decentralised political system in which individual towns and villages have enough armed power to demand concessions.
Economic assets
Money will clearly be central in deciding how Libya’s political system turns out.
It boils down not only to who controls the means of production, export, and sale of crude oil, but also the role of the international community, which must be willing and able to buy it.
Here the picture is far more complex than two rival governments each controlling a certain share of output and revenues. Individual ports and oil fields are frequently shut or opened by local armed protesters, who appear to have no allegiance to either administration.
Ibrahim Jadhran, for example, the pro-federalist leader whose group shut down key oil ports for around a year, recently said he had shunned a proposed deal to work with the groups now running Tripoli.
At the same time, he has kept export terminals at Ras Lanuf and Es Sider open, whereas closing them might have been one way to put pressure on the Tripoli government.
Local groups with on-the-ground control of facilities are likely to hedge their bets, look after their own interests first and wait to see what happens.
All sides are probably aware of the need to keep oil flowing and money coming in, even if it is only being spent on operating costs.
Output has recently stable at around 800,000-900,000 barrels per day (bpd) and money continues to flow into the Central Bank, which as we have previously argued plays a key role in the political dispute.
Libya does of course have other economic and financial assets, such as its overseas holdings, but they pale into insignifiance compared to the oil sector.
Strategic assets
Key elements in this category include the infrastructure that pumps freshwater from the southern underground aquifers to the coast. This infrastructure exists in both east and west Libya, and like oil pipelines and ports can be held hostage by local communities.
Airports are other vital strategic assets, and both sets of governments have been trying to revive international flights to western and eastern Libya respectively.
In Benghazi, the campaign to retake control of the city initially focussed on securing Benina and the surrounding area; an effort is now under way to prepare the airport for flights.
In Tripoli, the main airport is heavily damaged. Repairs are likely to take time and require significant funding, but the self-appointed government has in the interim sought to increase regional flights from Matiga.
Misrata, whose airport was not damaged by fighting, has been proactively pushing to operate flights to EU destinations, and while none have materialised yet, it did achieve a coup by having Turkish Airlines restart flights to Istanbul, and in the process become the only international carrier to run scheduled passenger services to Libya.
Ports are also crucial, as the recent fighting in Benghazi has shown, as are border areas. This relates not just to control of official crossings but also of lucrative informal trading routes. Smuggling and trafficking and have long been important sources of revenue in Libya, and even more so since the revolution.
Provincial support
The Tripoli government might control Tripoli and Misrata, and the Tobruq government might control parts of north-east Libya, but who is in charge of the rest of the country, particularly the south?
It is a mistake to see the Tripoli and Tobruq governments, and their respective allies, as the only two parties that will shape Libya’s future. The absence of any real state since 2011 means that many towns and villages have effectively become self-governing since the end of the conflict, although remain reliant on funding from oil revenues, passed down through ministries, to pay local salaries.
It remains hard to tell which groups support Tripoli and Tobruq respectively, though each have made claims.
In the past week, for instance, the Tripoli government issued a statement claiming that “all local councils had given support to the Libyan Dawn operation”, to which a report in a pro-HoR newspaper responded by saying that tribal leaders in Ghat, in south-west Libya, had only been willing to support Tripoli in return for money.
Some communities are more important than others: those that live near oil fields, pipelines or border crossings, for example. Each government will want to win allegiance from the key areas, a process in which guns and money will talk loudest.
Foreign support
Outside parties clearly influence what happens in Libya, but no single one is likely to have an overwhelming effect on shaping the country in the short-term.
In the north-east, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have widely reported to have been backing the Tobruq authorities and their ongoing campaign to take back control of Benghazi.
The actual level of their financial or military support is unclear, but the ambitions of Egypt, whose relatively new leader is still consolidating power and faces serious instability at home in the Sinai, are likely to focus on stemming the inflow of guns and fighters from Libya and securing borders.
Cairo is unlikely to have the desire or the resources to back Tobruq-allied groups in a full-on proxy war to take control of western Libya.
The main Western powers, meanwhile, have shown verbal support for the north-east government, which they consider to have been democratically elected and therefore legitimate. Yet they have been decidedly lukewarm in taking concrete action against the Tripoli administration, despite the fact it essentially took over power by force.
There have been threats of financial or energy sanctions, but no-one really wants to take 900,000 barrels per day (bpd) of Libyan crude off the international market and simultaneously deprive Libya (and many Libyans) of its only source of revenue.
“Westerners are waiting to see who is victorious in the field, even in defiance of democratic choices, to build relationships with him, as happened in Egypt“, said the self-declared Tripoli prime minister Omar al-Hassi recently, a claim which probably contains some truth.
For its part, the Tripoli administration so far seems to lack any official international backing. For that reason it may try to hold a fresh set of elections – at least in the areas it controls – in order to bolster its democratic credentials and win more international recognition.
Meanwhile the UN has intensified its efforts to broker dialogue between various groups, a process which Bernadino Leon, the new head of the United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL), has emphasised will be a "long and difficult process as the country is in a very difficult situation."
"A parliament and a government will not solve all the problems the country has. It will not solve the problems posed by many armed groups, many militias fighting on the ground, will not solve a very serious problem Libya has of terrorists in the east of the country and maybe in the south."
If efforts at dialogue do eventually reach some wider political settlement, a process which may take years, it is likely to involve significant levels of decentralisation and local self-rule, perhaps not so different to the result of the last UN-led effort at unification in the early 1950s.
That prospect would theoretically encourage every group to acquire as many economic, military, strategic and other assets as possible before going to the negotiating table.
What’s next?
In our view, a split into two distinct countries has always seemed unlikely, as is a clear-cut civil conflict between two distinct and organised parties.
There is no clear geographical division in Libya upon tribal, ethnic or religious grounds of the type that has led to other country break-ups, like South Sudan. Some neighbouring towns in western Libya, for example, are more antagonistic towards each other than to those on the other side of the country.
Similarly, the dividing line between east and west Libya is not a point of geographical stalemate in a major international conflict, as was partly the case with Korea and Germany when those two countries broke into two.
There also seems to be no internal appetite for a clear-cut split, at least not yet.
Another perspective is to see Gaddafi’s 42-year rule might as a blip in the broader historical context of Libya, a brief period in which the country was run – by force and concession – from a single centralised capital instead of being fragmented, unstable and confused.
No-one really knows how things will play out next, but the country could just be reverting to its long-term norm.
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