Archive - April 2023

Miriam Berger

Nearly two weeks of fighting in Sudan has threatened to tear apart the country of 49 million people — and to further inflame conflicts within its neighbors’ borders.

Sudan borders seven nations — Egypt, South Sudan, Chad, Central African Republic, Libya, Ethiopia and Eritrea — each of which have faced war, violent civil unrest or political upheaval in recent years. As hopes for a swift resolution in Sudan dim with each failed cease-fire, a “catastrophic conflagration” of the conflict could consume the region, U.N. Secretary General António Guterres warned this week.

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The violence in Sudan broke out April 15, pitting the Sudanese military against the rival paramilitary Rapid Support Forces after weeks of rising tensions over a power-sharing agreement.

The fighting has killed more than 450 people and displaced tens of thousands of civilians. Some have caught coveted seats on emergency airlifts and boats across the Red Sea. But most Sudanese have no option but to try to seek safety on their own.

What’s behind the fighting in Sudan, and what is at stake?

The risk of a regional spillover is high given Sudan’s geostrategic importance at the intersection of the Indian Ocean, Horn of Africa and Arab world. The Nile River and oil pipelines run through the mineral-rich nation, linking its fate with its neighbors.rom seven sides, Sudan’s neighbors are watching with trepidation.

In the north, Egypt relies on Sudan as a bulwark against political upheaval and a partner in regional water disputes. Egypt is close with Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the chief of Sudan’s army and de facto head of state, who is battling rival Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as Hemedti, of the paramilitary RSF.

The Sudanese army and RSF joined up in 2021 to overthrow Sudan’s civilian-led transitional government. The coup cut off Sudan’s path toward democracy, which began when nationwide protests in 2019 forced out former military leader Omar Hassan al-Bashir after 30 years in power. Egyptians ousted their longtime dictator, former president Hosni Mubarak, in 2011; the military seized power in 2013 in a coup led by now-President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi.

th water-stressed Egypt and Sudan rely on fresh water from the Nile River, which flows down from Ethiopia. The two countries say an upstream dam constructed by Ethiopia threatens their water supply — and any rift between Cairo and Khartoum could jeopardize efforts to reach a water-sharing agreement with Addis Ababa.

On Sudan’s opposite side, in recent days thousands of mainly South Sudanese refugees have been streaming across the 1,200 mile-long border between the two once-warring nations, on a return trip to South Sudan.

War-weary South Sudan — one of the world’s poorest countries — is ill-equipped to absorb Sudanese refugees or returning expatriates. About 12 million people live in South Sudan, roughly 2 million of whom are internally displaced and 75 percent of whom rely on humanitarian aid, according to Marie-Helene Verney, the U.N. refugee agency’s representative for the country. About 2.3 million South Sudanese are refugees in other countries in the region.

e sudden influx of so many Sudanese and returning South Sudanese in recent days risks reigniting conflict and competition over scant resources in the young nation. The mainly African and Christian or animist South Sudan gained independence from Arab and Muslim-majority Sudan in 2011, ending decades of civil war. But in 2013 a civil war began again in South Sudan, fueled by unsettled ethnic divisions and feuding leaders.

The north of South Sudan is economically dependent on Sudan, and the fighting has disrupted supplies of critical food and goods. Aid agencies, at the same time, are stretched thin: The international humanitarian response plan for South Sudan has received less than a quarter of the funding it requires, Verney said.

On Sudan’s western side, the United Nation’s estimates that about 100,000 Sudanese will flee over the border to Chad, a key regional U.S. ally. About 20,000 people crossed into Chad from western Sudan’s violence-plagued Darfur region in the first few days of fighting, according to the United Nations. Chad was already host to about 400,000 Sudanese refugees displaced by previous conflicts and housed in border camps.

The fighting in Sudan, and resulting power vacuums, could fuel political instability in Chad. Chad has a history of clashing with the precursor to the RSF — pro-government Sudanese Arab militias known as the Janjaweed. In the 2000s, the Janjaweed, under al-Bashir’s direction, terrorized Sudan’s Darfur region and conducted cross-border raids on Sudanese refugees in Chad. N’Djamena accused Khartoum of supporting Chadian rebels.

Chad also fears becoming caught in regional and proxy wars. Recently leaked U.S. intelligence documents, reported exclusively by The Washington Post, detail efforts by Russia’s paramilitary Wagner Group to recruit Chadian rebels and train them in the Central African Republic in a plot to topple Chad’s government. Wagner is active in the Central African Republic as part of Russia’s efforts to gain ground in Africa, other leaked U.S. documents said.

As Russians plot against Chad, concerns mount over important U.S. ally

The Central African Republic, a former French colony to Sudan’s southwest, has been battered by years of rebellion, mismanagement and sectarian violence. Armed groups and militias effectively run the country, where half the population lacks enough food and very few have access to clean water, according to the United Nations. Already, the unrest has led to price increases.

Wagner and the RSF have allies in another of Sudan’s neighbors: Several sources told The Post that a Libyan militia with Wagner ties sent supplies to Hemedti — allegations uniformly denied. Khalifa Hifter, a rebel leader who effectively controls eastern Libya, is backed by Wagner and is reportedly close with the RSF. Libya has been embroiled in civil war since the ouster of former dictator Moammar Gaddafi during the Arab Spring.

To Sudan’s southeast, Ethiopia is eyeing how the fighting will affect two of its key concerns: Securing water rights for the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, and settling Ethiopian claims to a disputed border region where fighting has erupted before. Sudan has also been a refuge for tens of thousands of Ethiopians from the Tigray region, which fought a two-year war with the central government that ended in a shaky peace deal late last year — and threatens to flare up again.

Changes in the region’s balance of power could also upset neighboring Eritrea’s fragile alliances. Sudan has hosted thousands of refugees and asylum seekers from its eastern neighbor, and is the first stop for many Eritrean men fleeing the repressive government’s forced conscription. Eritrea sided with Ethiopia in its recent war with Tigray rebels. Just a few years earlier, the two countries ended a decades-long cold war.

“The power struggle in Sudan,” Guterres told the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday, “is lighting a fuse that could detonate across borders, causing immense suffering for years, and setting development back for decades.”

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Miriam Berger is a staff writer reporting on foreign news for The Washington Post from Washington, D.C. Before joining The Post in 2019 she was based in Jerusalem and Cairo and freelance reported around the Middle East, as well as parts of Africa and Central Asia. 

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Frederic Wehrey

Outside powers take a growing interest in this oil-rich African state where the U.S. Embassy has been closed since 2014.

Success in diplomacy, like success in life—to borrow from an old cliché—largely depends on showing up. But for over half a decade, the United States hasn’t been showing up in Libya, at least not in a way that is sustained and meaningful. It speaks to a U.S. State Department approach to the country that is often more akin to sloganeering and wishful thinking than implementable policy.

Caught in the crossfire of inter-militia fighting that raged throughout the Libyan capital of Tripoli in summer 2014, U.S. diplomats shuttered their villa-based embassy and evacuated to Tunisia. They have yet to return, even as conditions in Libya have become considerably safer in the past years and other foreign embassies have either reopened or are in the process of doing so.

Their absence is due in part to the politicized legacy of the 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, which killed then-Ambassador to Libya J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans and unleashed a flurry of Republican scapegoating in Congress that has yet to fully abate. That tragic episode has also made Biden administration officials unusually risk averse in signing off on the embassy’s return to Libya.

Earlier this month, though, there were signs for guarded optimism that this may be changing. At a March 22 hearing of a Senate Appropriations subcommittee, Secretary of State Antony Blinken testified that his department was “actively working on” reestablishing a permanent U.S. diplomatic presence in Libya, though he declined to go into specifics about what steps the State Department was taking, or a timetable. The State Department has included funds for the return of the embassy to Tripoli in its budget request to Congress—a good thing—but it’s not clear if this funding will clear the Republican-dominated House of Representatives, or if and when Blinken will move forward with the reopening.

Without a physical presence in the country, the U.S. diplomats working on Libya will continue to be based at the U.S. embassy in neighboring Tunisia. But, as I’ve seen firsthand during extended fieldwork in Libya over the years, many of the Libyans who matter are unable or unwilling to make that trip, often for financial or political reasons. As a result, U.S. diplomats are unable to build trust with, understand, and possibly influence key Libyan players. Half-day in-and-out stops by senior U.S. officials to heavily fortified airports or ministries in Libya are hardly a viable substitute for continuous visibility and interaction.

These deleterious effects have only compounded as Libya’s security and energy importance has grown in recent years and a bevy of outside powers have taken a growing interest in the oil-rich African state.

Russia deployed thousands of Wagner Group mercenaries, regular personnel, and advanced weaponry in 2019-20 to support a military bid by eastern Libya-based warlord Khalifa Haftar. Haftar sought to topple the internationally recognized government in the capital. Though that effort failed because of Turkish military intervention, Russia continues to enjoy a spoiling influence in Libya. 

Most notably, it is propping up Haftar’s armed coalition, the Libyan Armed Forces, giving him the means to maintain his grip over vast swathes of Libyan territory and to block the export of Libyan oil—as he did from April to July 2022, precisely when crude prices were skyrocketing because of the Russia-Ukraine war. That self-serving act harmed ordinary Libyans, European states that receive Libyan energy exports, and the global economy, while conveniently benefiting the Kremlin.

Wagner fighters have also ensconced themselves around oilfields and inside airbases across southern and eastern Libya, from which they’ve ferried personnel and material into African states in the Sahel. Here, they’ve presented themselves as an appealing alternative to what locals perceive as an overbearing French—and American—neocolonial order, offering autocrats a suite of services, ranging from military training and counterinsurgency to propaganda and personal protection, while committing horrific abuses in the process.

It is a measure of just how seriously the Biden administration views Libya as a springboard for Russian power projection, as well as a potential source of illicit financing—Wagner personnel are already said to be tapping into Libyan oil revenues—that it recently dispatched two high-level emissaries to eastern Libya to meet with Haftar. CIA Director William Burns traveled to Benghazi in January, followed by Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Barbara Leaf in March. The details of their full discussion with the famously obdurate Haftar remain unclear, but it likely centered on his support for planned elections in Libya later this year and a mix of pressure, warnings, and incentives to compel him to cut his ties with Moscow and eject Russia’s mercenaries from Libyan soil.

But herein lies the longtime problem with Washington’s policy toward Tripoli—a problem that a sustained diplomatic presence may diminish but certainly can’t remedy completely.

U.S. officials from successive administrations have historically viewed Libya through the singular lens of some other U.S. policy priority, assigning it the role of a supporting actor a larger strategic drama: the quest for energy security, the fight against terrorism—especially the Islamic State, which set up a powerful affiliate in Libya—and now the United States’ rivalry with so-called great powers that many in Washington see playing out across the African continent and in the Middle East. As a result, the United States and its allies have pursued contradictory policies in Libya that have empowered an array of venal Libyan personalities and let the country more fragmented.

Relatedly, U.S. officials have often sacrificed the North African state on the altar of other, more pressing policy imperatives in the Middle East—namely, Iran and the Arab-Israel conflict—when they believe the United States requires the support of key Arab states such as Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, two habitual interferers in Libyan politics. According to this calculus, transgressions by these Arab partners in Libya, including breaking the arms embargo, enabling Haftar’s illegal bid for power and war crimes, and killing civilians in drone strikes, did not merit the expenditure of U.S. diplomatic capital in the form of a firm rebuke or pushback.

The United States’ distance from and disinterest in Libya has also produced a myopic reading of the country’s complex challenges.

The current fixation on a “Libyan-led” process toward parliamentary and presidential elections is a case in point. Holding those elections by the late fall or winter of this year is the centerpiece of an ambitious roadmap unveiled by the new U.N. envoy to Libya, the veteran Senegalese diplomat Abdoulaye Bathily. The United States and other Western states say they are enthusiastically backing this plan, but it is fraught with pitfalls, lacking in details, and seems destined to repeat the mistakes of the past.

There’s no question that the Libyan people want and deserve a legitimate, elected executive authority after more than a decade of ineffective appointed transitional governments and rump legislative bodies. But as it is currently construed, Bathily’s plan cedes too much control over the convening of elections to a coterie of avaricious Libyan politicos and militia bosses who benefit from the frozen status quo and are exploiting the election’s procedural and legal questions—over candidate eligibility, sequencing, and the powers of the presidency—to stall, obstruct, or otherwise shift balloting in their favor.

With so much subterfuge underway, it is nearly impossible that voting will occur on schedule, and if by some miracle it does it is likely to be marred by insecurity or violence, boycotting, and lack of free campaigning and ballot counting. In one of many worst-case post-election scenarios, Haftar might claim to win the south and east and accuse the other districts of fraud, leading to the further dissolution of the country—something that the elections are intended to avert.

All of this suggests that U.S. policymakers, following the United Nations’ lead, seem to have unrealistic expectations about what voting by itself will accomplish, especially when Libya’s political, financial, and military institutions remain so fragmented and leading figures have escaped accountability for past crimes. As in the past, elections seem to be an end to themselves, with little forethought given to the day after voting.

For many Libyans, then, and for those of us foreigners on the ground in Libya during the previous elections in 2012 and 2014—when nationwide voting didn’t put an end to Libya’s conflicts and divisions but merely reconfigured them—and in 2021, when another United Nations plan didn’t produce elections at all, Bathily’s roadmap elicits a sinking feeling of familiarity.

To be clear, U.S. development assistance policies toward Libya at the local level have been commendable and comprehensive, focused on bolstering civil society; promoting human rights, justice, and peacebuilding; training journalists; running workshops for elected municipal governments; and helping Libyan citizens adapt to the looming challenges of climate change. But none of this important work can be effectively done from outside the country or even from the confines of a fortress-like embassy—a truism that Stevens recognized and put into practice during his time as ambassador. And while he may have pushed the limits of person-to-person diplomacy, much has changed in the past decade in how the State Department deals with risks and protects its diplomats abroad.

Sensibly applying these improved security measures to Libya when reopening the U.S. embassy—while avoiding quick-fix solutions and grounding U.S. policy in local Libyan realities—is the best way to honor Stevens’s legacy and help Libyans achieve the future they deserve.

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Frederic Wehrey, a senior fellow in the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

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Tim Murithi

A PAN-AFRICAN VISION

An African vision for global order would be based on the principle of equality and the need to redress historical wrongs. Africa’s political and intellectual tradition draws on its experience as a freedom-seeking continent, deriving insights from the anticolonial and antiapartheid struggles. This emphasis on self-determination is evident in the work of many African governments to advance economic development, which is the ultimate form of empowerment. Solidarity among African states and societies helped sustain the campaigns against colonialism and apartheid in the twentieth century. Today, that sentiment underpins the AU and its Agenda 2063, a development plan that seeks to transform the continent into an economic powerhouse. And although the pan-African project remains a work in progress—and more must be done to consolidate democratic governance across the continent—it has much to teach the world.

Africa is constantly struggling for a more equitable global order. As targets of historical injustice, Africans are leading voices for justice—defined as fairness, equality, accountability, and redress for past harms. African societies have also shown the world how to promote reconciliation between warring groups and communities, most notably in South Africa. Africans are “reconciliactors,” as they proved at independence. When the former colonial powers withdrew from Africa, Africans did not immediately retaliate against Europeans for the brutal and exploitative system that they imposed on the people of the continent.

This long record of pursuing peace and reconciliation gives Africans the moral authority to demand a reconfiguration of the global order. Indeed, segments of the African foreign-policy-making community are clamoring to reform the multilateral system, replacing an order based on might makes right with one grounded in the pursuit of self-determination, global solidarity, justice, and reconciliation. In particular, they are pushing to transform the UN system into something fairer and more consonant with Africa’s own historical experiences.

THE NEW MULTILATERALISM 

No institution epitomizes the paternalistic exclusion of Africa more than the UN Security Council. According to the nonprofit International Peace Institute, more than half of Security Council meetings and 70 percent of Security Council resolutions with Chapter 7 mandates—those authorizing peacekeepers to use force—concern African security issues. Yet there are no African countries among the Security Council’s five permanent members, who are empowered to veto any resolution. The continent must make do with two or three rotating member seats that lack veto powers. It is a travesty of justice that African countries can only participate in deliberations and negotiations about their own futures on such unequal terms.

Africa has made the case for reform of the UN system before. In March 2005, the AU issued a proposal for reforming the world body that noted that “in 1945, when the UN was being formed, most of Africa was not represented and that in 1963, when the first reform took place, Africa was represented but was not in a particularly strong position.” The AU went on to state that “Africa is now in a position to influence the proposed UN reforms by maintaining her unity of purpose,” adding that “Africa’s goal is to be fully represented in all the decision-making organs of the UN, particularly in the Security Council.” But for almost 20 years, this appeal has been rebuffed by the permanent members of the Security Council, many of which are now scrambling to enlist African countries in their struggle over Ukraine.

Instead of attempting to resuscitate the 2005 AU proposal, which has largely been overtaken by events, African nations should go back to the drawing board and begin a new process for reforming the multilateral system. The founders of the UN recognized that the world body would not be able to survive indefinitely in its original form. As a result, they included a provision to review and amend its charter. Article 109 of the UN Charter enables a special “charter review conference” to be convened by a two-thirds majority of the UN General Assembly and a vote from any nine of the members of the Security Council. Such a vote cannot be vetoed by the permanent members, which in the past have sabotaged attempts to reform the council. Theoretically, therefore, there are no major obstacles to convening a charter review conference, apart from securing a two-thirds majority in the General Assembly. A coalition of African countries and other progressive states could immediately begin drafting a General Assembly resolution to put a charter review conference on the agenda.

Such a review conference would have the power to substantially alter the UN Charter and introduce new provisions that would transform the multilateral system. Unlike the current system, which privileges the interests of a few powerful states, the conference would be relatively democratic, since Article 109 states that “each member of the United Nations shall have one vote” and that provisions shall be approved by a two-thirds majority. Its recommendations would therefore hold a high degree of moral legitimacy, and the conference could further buttress its standing by conducting broad-based consultations with governments, civil society, businesses, trade unions, and academics.

The specifics of a revised multilateral system would be hashed out in the review conference, but the new order should be more democratic and better able to address the needs of the downtrodden—those who are displaced, affected by war, or simply impoverished. In practical terms, a new multilateral system should not be two tiered, as the current one is, since history has repeatedly shown that more powerful countries will abuse their privileged positions. No country should enjoy veto power over collective decision-making, and authority should be split between nation-states and supranational actors, including the AU, the EU, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and the Organization of American States. A world parliament akin to the current UN General Assembly, except with expanded democratic powers, might be reinforced by a global court of justice, both of which would have their own sources of funding—for instance, from taxes on international capital flows.

A SYSTEM REBORN

It would be naive to think that the beneficiaries of the current system, notably the five permanent members of the Security Council, would allow a review of the UN Charter simply because African countries have demanded one. Consequently, Africa will have to build a coalition of the willing, rallying the rest of the global South and whatever developed countries can be persuaded behind its bid to remake the multilateral system. But an institutional overhaul on this scale is not without precedent: other international organizations have transformed themselves in the past, notably the European Economic Community, which became the EU, and the Organization of African Unity, which became the AU.

African countries have an important role to play in reforming a multilateral system that is failing a majority of the world’s population. But until their interests and concerns are taken seriously, African governments will continue to pursue a strategy of nonalignment and intentional ambiguity in their dealings with major powers. Attempts to cajole or strong-arm them into picking a side in the latest might-makes-right contest in Ukraine are bound to fail, since no one in Africa believes that the international order is based on rules. It doesn’t have to be that way, however. Africa is showing the world how to build a fairer and more just global order.

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Tim Murithi

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year, many African countries declined to take a strong stand against Moscow. Seventeen African states refused to vote for a UN resolution condemning Russia, and most countries on the continent have maintained economic and trade ties with Moscow despite Western sanctions. In response, the United States and other Western countries have berated African leaders for failing to defend the “rules based” international order, framing African neutrality in the Ukrainian conflict as a betrayal of liberal principles. During a trip to Cameroon in July 2022, French President Emmanuel Macron bemoaned the “hypocrisy” of African leaders and criticized them for refusing “to call a war a war and say who started it.”

But the truth is that the rules-based international order has not served Africa’s interests. On the contrary, it has preserved a status quo in which major world powers—be they Western or Eastern—have maintained their positions of dominance over the global South. Through the UN Security Council, in particular, China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States have exerted outsize influence over African nations and relegated African governments to little more than bystanders in their own affairs. The British-, French-, and U.S.-led bombardment of Libya in 2011, justified by a contested interpretation of a UN Security Council resolution authorizing a no-fly zone, stands out as a case in point. Before NATO intervened, the African Union was pursuing a diplomatic strategy to de-escalate the crisis in Libya. But once the military operation began, the AU effort was rendered moot, and Libya was plunged into a cycle of violence and instability from which it has yet to escape.

For decades, African countries have called for the UN Security Council to be reformed and the broader international system to be reconfigured on more equitable terms. And for decades, their appeals have been ignored. The current global order, dominated by a few powerful countries that define peace and security as the imposition of their will on others, is now at an inflection point. More and more countries in Africa and elsewhere in the global South are refusing to align with either the West or the East, declining to defend the so-called liberal order but also refusing to seek to upend it as Russia and China have done. If the West wants Africa to stand up for the international order, then it must allow that order to be remade so that it is based on more than the idea that might makes right.

WHOSE ORDER?

For most of the last 500 years, the international order was explicitly designed to exploit Africa. The transatlantic slave trade saw more than ten million Africans kidnapped and shipped to the Americas, where their forced labor made elites in Europe and the United States exceptionally wealthy. European colonialism and apartheid rule were likewise brutal, extractive, and dehumanizing for Africans, and the legacies of these systems are still felt across the continent. The CFA franc, a relic of the colonial past that still gives France tremendous sway over the economies of 14 West African and central African countries, offers a daily reminder of this historical subjugation, as does the persistence of white economic power in South Africa. Both reinforce the perception that today’s international order still treats Africans as global second-class citizens.

Many Western pundits are quick to demand that Africa “get over” these injustices and stop harping on the past. But African societies do not see the past as past. They see it as present, still looming large over the pan-African landscape. Moreover, the tormentors of yesteryear have not changed their mindsets and attitudes—just their rhetoric and methods. Instead of taking what they want with brute force, as they did in the past, major powers now rely on preferential trade deals and skewed financing arrangements to drain the continent of its resources, often with the collusion of corrupt African elites.

And of course, major powers still use force. Despite claiming to uphold an international system based on rules, these powers and their allies have frequently imposed their will on other countries, from the NATO bombardments of Yugoslavia and Libya to the U.S.-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq to the Russian invasions of Georgia and Ukraine. In 2014, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France led a military intervention in Syria in support of rebel forces, which was followed, in 2015, by a Russian military intervention in support of the Syrian government. Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine is not a departure from this pattern but a continuation of the reign of the powerful over the less powerful.

Major-power interventions have steadily eroded the pretense of a rules-based order and made the world much less stable. For instance, the illegal invasions of Iraq and Syria stoked violent extremist movements, including al Qaeda and the Islamic State (also known as ISIS), which have since spread like a virus across Africa. Thanks in part to the chaos spawned by NATO’s intervention in Libya, Islamist terrorism has taken root across the Sahel region, affecting Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger. Similarly, in East Africa, religious extremism imported from the Middle East is undermining stability in Kenya, Mozambique, Somalia, and Tanzania, all of which are terrorized by an extremist group known as al Shabab. These threats are not acutely felt in Washington, London, Paris, Brussels, Moscow, or Beijing. Rather, they are faced by Africans who had little say in the interventions that ignited them.

The major powers have created a curious juxtaposition: on one hand, illegal interventions that have sowed terror across the global South, and on the other, international failures to intervene in humanitarian crises—in Rwanda in 1994, Srebrenica in 1995, Sri Lanka in 2009, and now in China, where more than a million Uyghurs have been imprisoned in camps. This discrepancy exposes the lie at the heart of today’s international system. Those who continue to call for the protection of an illusionary rules-based order have evidently not been on the receiving end of an unsanctioned military incursion. Many Africans see these voices as part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

The myth of a functioning system of international norms that constrains the whims of nations must now be discarded. World powers must acknowledge what African countries have known for decades: that the dysfunctional international order poses a clear and present danger to many developing countries. The United Nations’ system of collective security is slowly dying, suffocated by the egregious actions of some of its most powerful members. Not only does this system exclude a majority of the world’s population from international decision-making, but it also often leaves them at the mercy of hostile powers and forces. It is past time to rethink and remake the global order. That does not necessarily mean throwing the UN baby out with the bath water, but it does mean reimagining multilateralism and redesigning international institutions to create a more effective global system of collective security.

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Jason Pack & Stefano Marcuzzi

Part 4) Heading Forward: Can the Narrative War be Stopped? Can the Libyan Banking Sector be Reformed?

A final assessment of the situation and some policy recommendations. Most Western policymakers we spoke to cited the reunification of the CBL as a paramount concern, yet among the businesspeople interviewed for this report the security situation and the lack of trusted contacts, not the lack of structural reforms or reunification, remains the main impediment to doing business in Libya.

The narrative war and Enduring Disorder has obscured for most that transparency is the fundamental underlying issue for the banking sector, not reunification. Reunification appears to require that a complete political transition to a unified and constitutional governance occur. Reforms, however, can be implemented even as the period of seemingly endless interim governance continues. Therefore, the focus on reunification rather than reforms seems destined to fail just as the focus on elections prior to economic reforms did.

For too long, international policymakers have thought: We can’t incentivize the reform of Libyan banking procedures while the sector is bifurcated, so the international community should focus on unification. But that logic needs to be turned on its head: Reunification cannot proceed while the CBL’s actions remain so opaque, inefficient, and shrouded in a narrative war. Only once transparency is achieved and the narrative war disentangled from policymaking can reunification be achieved.

All groups we spoke to in our research, especially in the private sector, also considered that some improvements are desirable and possible even in the current state of political unrest. Below are some policy recommendations that our interlocutors mentioned that could be implemented in the short, medium, and long term, to promote sector efficiency and improve the prospect of economic and financial development.

These recommendations are calculated to mitigate the ongoing narrative war that makes progress so difficult in Libya, despite its fundamentally enviable underlying financial situation. In fact, progress on reform could be made in certain instances with the stroke of a pen, the convening of a task force, the mustering of political will, or the embedding of empowered experts.

Short-term measures to be taken by the CBL:

• Increase oversight. Cooperate and share information with regulatory institutions. The CBL must share its internal accounts with the AB and ACA to increase overall oversight of commercial banks, including through more frequent inspections. This will decrease the likelihood of bank failures, reduce the spread of misinformation, and diffuse allegations of corruption.

• Improve reliability of payments. This is a serious concern for international companies. The CBL could produce streamlined “how to” information about letters of credit and backpayments, and send representatives to major international firms interested in Libya to foster better cooperation and rapid reaction in case of emergencies. Most bureaucratic payment delays over letters of credit have now been resolved, but those rooted in politics tend to become protracted as sitting down and finding compromises is difficult due to the lack of mediation channels.

• Improve governance, accessibility, and transparency. This is arguably the domain in which the narrative war most obscures the functioning of the banking sector. We propose the following quick wins to disentangle technical matters from media optics while better informing Libyans and Libya-watchers about the actual state of affairs, hence blunting the potential impact of misinformation:

* Create a system to transparently monitor financial transfers into and out of the CBL and ministries. Results should be published online in Arabic and English.

* Update and publish organization charts and contact details of the CBL and related institutions to improve access and specify a clearer demarcation of roles.

* Publish details about CBL, subsidiary, and corresponding banks’ liquidity.

* The CBL should adopt the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) for Central Banks. This would not only facilitate investment and economic activity, but it would also fight the politicization and spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories about the CBL.

* Announce in advance the CBL’s schedule for a stated number of regular board and committee meetings each year, whose decisions would be published.

* Promote Libya’s adherence to the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI).

* Make sure that the numbers in the published revenues of the NOC tally exactly with CBL’s incomings and outgoings, and that care is taken to show exactly what foreign currency exchange gains and losses occur at each point.

* Make sure that letter of credit allocations are decided on the basis of published criteria, with the meetings deciding those allocations being recorded and published.

Medium-term measures to be taken by the CBL and the Libyan authorities in coordination with international partners:

• Strengthen technical competence. Improving the efficiency of Libyan commercial banks and the government’s financial bureaucracy will be critical to raising standards in the sector. The CBL needs to strengthen its capacity to absorb, manage, and distribute capital/deposits, as well as its delivery of basic services.

This could be done through training modules established in partnership with international banks and corporations, including the IMF and World Bank, thus expanding the USAID initiative. In parallel, the CBL could improve its capacity to attract skilled personnel from abroad (including foreign professionals, embedded experts, and educated Libyan expats), through incentives and more transparent hiring procedures. This step will also reduce the attractiveness of conspiracy theories.

• Improve legislation. An adequate legal framework is key to promoting non-corrupt business practices. Libyan authorities should consider updating banking regulations, including through joint Libyan-international forums on technical and legal adjustments to the regulatory framework. Libya’s private and online banking sectors lack sufficient modern legal frameworks to govern them.

As a result, most businesses operating in the IT and Fintech space are not only entirely unregulated and untransparent, they cannot achieve global competitiveness, despite strong Libyan human capital in these fields.

• Embed experts. We strongly suggest that Libyan government officials request embedded experts from allied governments — British and American experts tend to be unable to embed in Libya institutions for security and bureaucratic reasons, but experts from Italy and smaller European countries are keen to deploy for the task. They should be given more than just advisory and training functions, and should be harnessed to help create the structures of transparency.

• Delineate and then narrow the CBL’s role. Produce a study explaining the exact legal powers of the CBL relative to other Libyan entities. Once such a study is carried out, a consortium of Libyan and international stakeholders could consider narrowing the CBL’s mandate to one more akin to that of other central banks through a range of modifications to Libyan laws and international agreements. Important questions need to be asked like: Should the CBL monopolize all FX transactions? Is there an economic logic for preserving the CBL as the central node through which all flows of money into and out of Libya must pass?

Long-term measures for international players:

• Continue to pursue the unification of the western and eastern banks, but only as part of a long-term culmination of more immediate reforms. Despite the narrative war over CBL unification, international stakeholders should not give up promoting sector reunification. Rather they should conceptualize it as the culmination of prior reform and transparency processes.

Relaunching that process after transparency reforms are already implemented would be crucial both for political purposes and to encourage greater efficiency. It would also serve to reject further intrusions by Russia and undercut its misinformation narrative. Failing to encourage transparency and subsequent reunification could allow Russia to exploit the eastern CBL’s need for money to gain greater leverage with eastern economic and political authorities.

• The United States undoubtedly has an interest in securing the transparent management of oil revenues and budgets in Libya — both as a way to secure greater stability in North Africa and to ensure Russia is not benefitting from the Libyan oil sector. The Biden administration has recently taken steps indicating that it will redouble its efforts to bring transparency and accountability to Libya’s finances while simultaneously confining itself to the margins of the Libyan elections debate and allowing the U.N. to call the shots and generate political will on that file.

We applaud this approach and advocate for American policymakers to continue to use carrots and serious sticks in their push for transparency and accountability in Libya’s banking sector.

Part 5) Conclusion:

Central Banking and the Global Enduring Disorder We zoom out to show how the situation with the Libya banking sector is a key case study in how contested institutions and controversial financial flows play out in our newly disordered global system and give rise to narrative wars.

This report has showcased that rather than Libya becoming financially more unified in the wake of the defeat of Hifter’s attempt to take Tripoli, parallel and bifurcated institutions have actually taken further hold. In this fraught environment, rather than pursuing unification, reforming itself, and adopting genuine transparency, the CBL has pursued business as usual combined with a dose of window dressing transparency.

This does not imply corruption or malfeasance, but it allows for a growing narrative that the bank has emerged once again as a partisan political actor connected to Turkish and factional Libyan interests. These trends of fragmentation, regional penetration of ungoverned conflict spaces, and conspiracy theories are indicative of the Global Enduring Disorder.

We firmly believe that reforming Libya’s economy to make its financial flows more genuinely transparent is the key to preventing its disordered economic landscape from keeping the country from being permanently dysfunctional and spreading disorder elsewhere. The CBL cannot achieve this alone; it needs buy-in from other stakeholders and pressure from international players to hold everyone accountable.

In fact, Libya’s banking sector could be used as a key case study of how opaque financial flows work in our newly disordered global system and give rise to conspiracy theories and contagion. There are key lessons that can be drawn for understanding issues like corporate financing of political campaigns, financial flows from specific Russian oligarchs, and transnational crime networks.

Transparency is required to disentangle actual from alleged malfeasance. Many status quo actors globally are threatened by transparency and reforms, preferring narrative wars and conspiracy theories that obscure real causation chains. Financial transparency is useful in most contested political spaces, inasmuch as money, power, and control of the narrative are highly linked. That said, transparency initiatives alone have few success stories; they need to be paired with sticks and carrots from international policymakers to incentivize follow-up reforms.

This is something that the Libya context is uniquely well suited for, as the international community acting in concert has much structural leverage. Furthermore, this paper refers to transparency as the first step to gaining structural momentum and social trust for initiatives like bank reunification and then later elections. Unless reforms of the Libyan banking sector are undertaken, the Western policymakers we spoke to are concerned that the political and financial division of the country may become an established fact. This eventuality would further crystallize if eastern institutions were able to smuggle crude oil or implant stooges inside the CBL board who will facilitate illicit expenditures. We counsel a “follow the money” approach:

Western officials should not get lost in the media debates about the constitutional basis for elections or new interim governments, the root causes of all the status quo attempts to block political progress are financial opacity. The high-ranking officials and businesspeople we spoke to claim the current state of affairs cannot be prolonged indefinitely.

According to one of them, “a system in which the printing of illegal banknotes by the eastern CBL continues, while the western CBL has no supervisory role over eastern commercial banks, and the GNU is unable to pursue a national financial and economic policy, will lead to a collapse, sooner or later. Not in a month’s time, probably not in two years’ time, but in four or five years.”

Hence, international policymakers still seem to believe in the importance of U.N.-mediated Libyan national elections, stating that “even though they did not take place in December 2021 and can be postponed and held through other legal frameworks, they cannot indefinitely be postponed or Libya will cease to exist as a functional entity.”

Finally, our research suggested that many embedded financial players in Libya do not wish elections to take place as they risk losing their fiefdoms. They are willing to put forth a media song and dance about new electoral mechanisms or interim governments, but they are not willing to have genuine oversight of Libya’s finances.

They are aware that thorough reform of economic structures requires electoral legitimacy to happen, and thus are impeding such legitimacy through obfuscation, foot dragging, spoiler proposals, and narrative wars. We propose an initial focus on incremental economic reform and transparency that will allow subsequent bank reunification and then finally elections to be undertaken, rather than the approach that most U.N. and Western countries have proposed of elections first and economic reform later. We believe the tried and tested approach of elections first, all other reforms second, has failed. Genuine elections resulting in a transfer of power to constitutional governance appear impossible in Libya so long as the opaque “war economy” and destructive narrative war over Libya’s finances persist.

***

Jason Pack is a former non-resident scholar at MEI, author of Libya and the Global Enduring Disorder, and the president of LibyaAnalysis LLC. He is the Director of the NATO & THE GLOBAL ENDURING DISORDER Project and a Senior Analyst for Emerging Challenges at the NATO Defense College Foundation.

Stefano Marcuzzi is a Research Fellow at the Center for Higher Defense Studies (CASD), Rome, a Senior Analyst at Libya Analysis LLC, an Adjunct Fellow at University College Dublin (UCD) and Boston University (BU), and an Emerging Challenges Analyst at the NATO Defense College Foundation (NDFC), Rome. He is the author of The EU, NATO and the Libya Conflict. Anatomy of a Failure.

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Severe Restrictions on Local, International Civil Society

Libya’s Government of National Unity (GNU) and other authorities are cracking down on nongovernmental domestic and foreign organizations, Human Rights Watch said today. The GNU should withdraw onerous registration and administration requirements and ensure that civic groups are free to operate.

In a March 21, 2023 circular, the Office of the Prime Minister of the Tripoli-based GNU said that domestic and foreign nongovernmental organizations could continue operating only if they “correct their legal status” in line with a draconian 2001 Muammar Gaddafi-era law. This statement came after months of increasing restrictions on civic group activities, including harassment and at times detention and prosecution of local staff members and obstacles for non-Libyans working in humanitarian, human rights, and other nongovernmental organizations to obtain entry visas.

“Libyan authorities are crushing civic space using the tired pretext of enforcing regulations,” said Hanan Salah, associate Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “The authorities should instead be protecting that space by upholding the right to freedom of association.”

On March 8, the Law Department of the Supreme Judicial Council, which oversees judicial affairs and the legal profession, issued an edict in response to a request by the Tripoli Commission of Civil Society declaring, “illegal all civil associations and civil society organizations not established based on the provisions of Law 19/2001 on Nongovernmental Organizations.” The edict also specified that civic groups established under any other regulations were “null and void.”

In response, on March 13, the GNU issued a circular ordering all government institutions to uphold it until further notice. On March 21, the GNU retracted this statement and gave nongovernmental organizations provisional legal standing until they “correct their legal status,” without providing a clear timeline.

The Gaddafi-era Law 19/2001 on the Reorganization of Nongovernmental Organizations greatly restricts civil society work, permitting registration only for groups with a mandate to work on social, cultural, sports-oriented, charitable or humanitarian issues, but not other issues including human rights. The government did not clarify how such organizations can legally operate.

Law 19/2001 also has overly burdensome registration requirements and empowers authorities to intervene in associations’ leadership and dissolve organizations without a court order. The group Frontline Defenders reported in 2015 that only 22 organizations were registered under the law.

Some Libyan legal experts contend that Law 19/2001 was effectively suspended with the adoption of the Libyan Constituent Covenant by the National Transitional Council in 2011, which guarantees freedom of association, speech, and assembly. However, legislators have yet to revoke the Penal Code provisions for severe punishments, including the death penalty, for the establishment of “unlawful” associations, which have been in place since the Gaddafi era.

For years, Libyan authorities and various armed groups around the country have restricted the ability of nongovernmental groups and their staff members to operate, Human Rights Watch said. The United Nations Independent Fact-Finding Mission on Libya in its March report found, “[a]ttacks against … human rights defenders, women’s rights activists, journalists and civil society associations have created an atmosphere of fear that has sent persons into self-censorship, hiding or exile.”

The Fact-Finding Mission also highlighted the three-year prison sentence with hard labor handed down in December 2022 in Tripoli on four members of the Tanweer Movement, a grassroots organization that promoted culture and arts activities, on charges of “atheism, agnosticism, being feminist and infidels.”

The four were among a group of nine men whom the Tripoli Internal Security Agency, an armed group, arrested between November 2021 and March 2022, on a range of accusations including atheism and anti-Islam sentiments. Videotaped “confessions” by some of them, apparently obtained under duress, appeared on social media. At least three of the four men sentenced are in prison, while the other five remain in pre-trial detention.

In March 2022, Tanweer members who had fled abroad dissolved the organization and canceled the group’s social media presence. In a final statement, they decried the crackdown and called for their colleagues’ release.

The imprisonment of Tanweer members, using religion as a pretext, will deter Libyan youth from engaging in civil society activities, Human Rights Watch said.

Since late 2022, the authorities have also greatly limited entry visas for non-Libyan staff of humanitarian agencies and nongovernment organizations, including Human Rights Watch and other rights groups. UN officials have said the measures also affected agencies linked with the UN.

The UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, Reem Alsalem, who visited Libya in December, said in a statement that she had encountered many obstacles, including a lack of access to detention centers holding women and girls. The Libyan Arab Armed Forces (LAAF), the armed group under the command of Khalifa Hiftar that effectively controls eastern Libya, barred her from leaving the airport in Benghazi for visits and meetings that she had planned there.

Alsalem is only the second UN expert to visit Libya since 2011, following a visit in 2018 by the UN special rapporteur on the human rights of internally displaced persons. Visit requests from at least nine other experts, including the special rapporteurs on torture, trafficking, migrants, and slavery, are pending.

The Fact-Finding Mission said the GNU authorities did not give them access to detention facilities anywhere in Libya during their two-year mandate. Neither the GNU nor the LAAF allowed them access to Libya’s southern region, which the LAAF largely controls.

Withholding entry visas for aid organization staff could impair delivery of aid to vulnerable populations. Several members of nongovernmental organizations told Human Rights Watch that their foreign employees had been unable to obtain entry visas since the end of 2022. These included international humanitarian and human rights organizations, and implementing partners of the UN in Libya.

Human Rights Watch has received no response from GNU authorities to its applications for entry visas since October 2022.

A slew of vaguely worded laws governing expression, assembly, association, cybercrime, and crimes against the state severely restricts nongovernmental organizations in Libya. The Commission of Civil Society, a Tripoli-based body tasked with registering and approving civic organizations and their activities, has sweeping powers to inspect documents, control funding, and cancel the registration and work permits of domestic and foreign organizations. A second Benghazi-based body with similar functions reports to the Government of National Stability (GNS).

The Tripoli-based GNU, which was nominated by delegates of the Libya Political Dialogue Forum in March 2021 after UN-facilitated political talks, and the rival eastern and Sirte-based GNS, nominated by the House of Representatives in March 2022 and allied with the LAAF, vie for national political legitimacy and control in Libya.

Libyan legislators and authorities should ensure the following as a matter of priority:

• Adopt a civil society organization law that guarantees the right to freedom of association and expression consistent with international law and best practices;
• Reform Penal Code articles that undermine freedom of association and assembly, redefining criminal acts to exclude peaceful exercise of the right to express opinions, assemble, and establish associations;
• Release detained Tanweer members and anyone else held for the peaceful exercise of their basic rights;
• Repeal the death penalty as a punishment for establishing or participating in unlawful organizations;
• Allow for the free establishment of associations without restriction on what they advocate or promote, with the exception of acts of violence, incitement to imminent violence, or other serious crimes;

Ensure that any suspension or dissolution of a nongovernmental organization takes place only by judicial order and in response to serious violations of national law that result in a clear and imminent danger, are strictly proportional to the legitimate aim pursued, and used only when other measures would be insufficient.

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Jason Pack & Stefano Marcuzzi

Part 3) The Cost of Bifurcation and Opacity: Business and Politics in a Divided Libya

This section partially examines the technical consequences of the lasting CBL division, but primarily probes perceptions of major international stakeholders concerning the bifurcation. This analysis confirms that the CBL is at the epicenter of interlocking narrative wars not only inside Libya but also among international actors.

These narrative wars obscure the actual technical issues that impede doing business with Libya and making its economy function more effectively. External observers — including most analysts and policymakers — tend to consider the division between the western and eastern CBL as primarily a political issue. “It’s a political fracture that has de facto become a technical one,” said one Western official.

The lack of transparency in the CBL, and especially in the reunification procedures, is acknowledged by most technical experts we spoke to as having a negative impact on Libya’s economy. Yet others, mostly in the Western business community, see it as having almost no practical implications for doing business as the Tripoli-based CBL functions as the country’s finance ministry and Central Bank rolled into one, while the eastern bank does “very little other than try to obfuscate matters, block progress, and attempt illicit transactions” according to a knowledgeable American banker.

This group of businesspeople consider the bifurcation of the bank as essentially a “reputational problem” and part of the media optics that make doing business in Libya difficult. They see it as “inevitable and unsurprising” that there would be profound misinformation about the banking sector circulating, as a virulent narrative war surrounds each major institution and impedes its proper functioning. This analysis essentially relates the divisions in the bank to the prevailing dynamics of the Global Enduring Disorder, where narrative mirages are cast by spoilers to divide their opponents and rally their supporters.

Most stakeholders outside of Libya are less clear about the practical implications (or lack thereof) in financial, structural, technical, and economic terms of the west-east banking divide. For companies interested in pursuing new business ventures in Libya, security, transparency, and the availability of contacts are the main issues to consider when contemplating investing.

For them, CBL bifurcation is truly a mirage and not one of their leading concerns. Many stakeholders, such as a major French businessperson we spoke to, admit to “not understanding how the CBL functions.” He also noted the lack of a legal framework and of an infrastructure network that could support “bankable” projects on the ground as essential to fostering foreign investment.

International stakeholders operating in Libya are much more aware of the negative practical implications of the stalled unification of the banking system than were the Western government policymakers we surveyed. In the words of a different French banker who had been influenced by what others would see as misinformation, “When you have two monitoring authorities, it is impossible to be credible and to apply a national fiscal policy.

The result is a de facto double economic system, with two exchange rates, and diverging regulatory frameworks.” An American government affairs professional who downplayed the importance of CBL bifurcation noted that, on the other hand, “the failure by the HoR to pass the GNU’s budget has created real problems for U.S. businesses as they are uncertain how much money will be allocated to specific sectors and if their projects will ever get funded.” Consequently, their firms are unable to plan ahead for their activities in Libya.

This uncertainty, which does not actually stem from CBL bifurcation but yet may be confused with it, is causing many businesses to reevaluate their commitment to Libya, as a perception exists that corporate income streams are “too unreliable to merit investing in the future,” especially as elections hang in the air and “no one knows when they might ever occur.”

Furthermore, a European embassy official told us that the fact that years ago “the eastern CBL’s Russian-printed dinars had intoxicated the Libyan economy and inflated the black market” presents the specter that this might happen again. A major European multinational operating in the country warned that a reunification of the banking sector is considered “essential for the delivery of ordinary services,” including internal bank transactions. In its absence, it is “just impossible to defend our business decisions to our superiors.”

In this sense, the eastern CBL and its backers are happy to maintain profound ambiguity around CBL unification as the current situation helps deny investments to western Libya and the official institutions. It also harms their western counterparts by making it look like they are not in control of a national institution.

A European banker with direct experience in the sector pointed out that “the eastern Libyan commercial banks — especially the Libyan Development Bank in Benghazi — are stronger and more active than most people think.” They also stressed that divisions exist between the CBL and some commercial banks, including from Tripolitania.

The impact of this is reported to be huge: Entire banks can be paralyzed by vetoes from individuals on their board of directors who play a political game. “There is no professionalism, it is rather puzzling,” commented one European interviewee. According to several Libyan businessmen, this has led to the spectacular rise of the private banking sector — “a sector that was less than 3% of all transactions five years ago has grown to achieve parity of transactions with the state-owned banking sector.”

These problems of genuine inefficiency are aggravated by the fact that the CBL rarely inspects its subsidiary commercial banks — which leaves the CBL unsure about how the smaller banks (which it owns) operate, and in turn, it leaves Libyan commercial banks largely unchecked. Thus, according to another European businessperson with decades of experience in the Middle East, “In Libya, unlike elsewhere, nobody has even a glimmering of the activities in which a given bank is involved, until a scandal breaks out.”

Major European banks also expressed concern to us over the decline in deposits in Libyan commercial banks, which proved detrimental because the local banks, which should finance or act as counterparties to most foreign medium-to-small-size investments in Libya, were the most affected by the ongoing liquidity crunch. Other banking interlocutors referenced the CBL’s self-disclosures about the sector on its website as “completely useless” and presenting “cooked books.”

A second set of problems for investors in Libya is connected to the CBL’s opacity around its own governance and internal procedures. The bank is widely considered by our interviewees to be the personal fiefdom of Kabir, who has been in charge since 2011. Many stakeholders believe that knowing the “right people” is key to make business, and especially to gaining access to letters of credit.

The CBL’s perceived “partiality” is a significant obstacle to international companies from countries that have weaker ties with the Tripoli-based authorities, such as France. The bank’s unclear internal procedures, and the lack of governance mechanisms generally associated with a central bank, such as audit committees, are also cited as limiting trust. Whether actual partiality exists or not, its perception is a crucial part of the media war waged by Kabir’s detractors.

Libyan businessmen we interviewed spoke of “marked improvements in efficiency and transparency, especially concerning letters of credit and backpayments,” but acknowledged that this information is all in Arabic and does not change international perceptions.

A third set of problems is linked to what an Italian businessman called “daily technical faults” hampering the efficiency of the sector. While acknowledging that the CBL is the most efficient financial institution in Libya, stakeholders with direct experience in the region see it as falling well below average standards in the rest of the Middle East and North Africa. One southern European banking interviewee complained that, “If you go to Morocco, Tunisia, or Algeria, banks are precise like clocks. They have even adopted European methods for accounting financial activities. Libya is the exception.”

This originates in the lack of a regulated bureaucratic banking culture and administrative competence dating back to the Gadhafi period, a problem further aggravated by the fact that certain skilled bureaucrats who had served under the old regime were replaced by inexperienced personnel after the Uprisings.

The reliability of payments and services, including CBL letters of credit, are questioned by many international stakeholders. One of them described the process of selling goods to Libya as follows: “First, we alert our Libyan partner [intermediary]; second, he goes to his commercial bank; third, he asks for a CBL letter of credit; once that is confirmed, fourth, the shipment can happen.

The bottleneck is between points 3 and 4, where there is a need for a service from the CBL.” Although elements of the narrative war link this delay to the aforementioned CBL politicization, the interviewee considered it more likely to be the result of bureaucratic inefficiency.

For companies not yet established in Libya, their search for a banking partner is “a nightmare,” in the words of a separate European interviewee: “Most commercial banks have no balance sheets or they have outdated ones. You don’t know who you can trust.” This was acknowledged by the new chairman of the National Commercial Bank (NCB), Musbah Akkari, who on Sept. 14 publicly promised to improve services.

Among non-Libyan policymakers the apparently limited understanding of these dynamics has favored a personalization of the debate over the stalled process of unification and banking sector reform. This is where the narrative war massively obscures actual technical and political issues. There has been a tendency to center the analysis around Kabir, his personality, his responsibilities, and his future role in the sector. Yet it is unclear even to experts what his exact role in these processes is.

Some foreign policymakers, especially in France, tend to see Kabir as epitomizing a broken status quo, and would like to see new interlocutors emerge from both the Libyan political and economic spheres. Such perceptions are supplemented by French officials’ accusations of technical mismanagement of the CBL — namely that “Kabir keeps the CBL utterly inefficient to make himself indispensable” — and of misuse of oil revenues.

This is quite different than the view we encountered among American policymakers and businesspeople, who see the CBL and the governor “as protecting Libya’s wealth,” or a prevailing pragmatic view we encountered in Italy that Kabir represents “a political status quo which is preferable to other possible alternatives.”

Interestingly, while many international firms and domestic Libyan experts voiced concerns over Kabir’s connection with Tripolitanian armed groups and considered his management of the CBL inefficient, none cited to us proof of wrongdoing, preferring to reference various allegations — another aspect of the narrative war. Other firms we spoke to, particularly in America, saw Kabir as a guarantee of institutional continuity and relative competence.

Both groups, however, disliked the personalization of the debate surrounding the CBL: “In Libya there is too much talking of the person, and not enough discussion about the role and the rules, and about improving the efficiency of the sector itself.” In short, just like the politics surrounding Brexit or the MAGA movement in America, technical policy choices have simply exited the mainstream debate — replaced by personalization, accusation, and narrative wars. This seems to be a defining feature of the Global Enduring Disorder

***

Jason Pack is a former non-resident scholar at MEI, author of Libya and the Global Enduring Disorder, and the president of LibyaAnalysis LLC. He is the Director of the NATO & THE GLOBAL ENDURING DISORDER Project and a Senior Analyst for Emerging Challenges at the NATO Defense College Foundation.

Stefano Marcuzzi is a Research Fellow at the Center for Higher Defense Studies (CASD), Rome, a Senior Analyst at Libya Analysis LLC, an Adjunct Fellow at University College Dublin (UCD) and Boston University (BU), and an Emerging Challenges Analyst at the NATO Defense College Foundation (NDFC), Rome. He is the author of The EU, NATO and the Libya Conflict. Anatomy of a Failure.

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Irene Fernández-Molina

In my interviews with Libya-focused diplomats and international practitioners based in Tunis in early 2019, there was a widespread, ex-post acknowledgment that the GNA had been one of those ‘fictions the international community has to get into’.

Secondly, the relationship between the legitimacy and effectiveness of the various aspiring Libyan governments is a complex one, and foreign actors have had to balance between these two types of criteria.

In the case of the GNA, after being originally externally enabled, legitimacy became taken for granted and prioritised by the international community, who expected a virtuous circle whereby effectiveness would progressively come to match it. However, from 2016 onwards, the GNA did not become more effective in its rule over Libyan territory and population.

Quite the opposite: its rival Haftar’s LAAF consolidated and expanded its control in the east and the south of the country. This led international interaction with this anti-GNA rebel to gradually shift from informal engagement to increasingly official diplomatic practices, deflating the exclusiveness of the recognition of the GNA in several respects.

Diplomatic practices towards Haftar grew in significance from bilateral visits from regional allies such as Egypt and the UAE to official invitations from Russia in 2016, and to participation on an equal footing with the GNA’s head Fayez al-Sarraj in the Libya-focused multilateral summits organised by France and Italy in 2017 and 2018. Chief among the justifications for such an evolution provided in my fieldwork was that Haftar could ‘not be ignored’ as an effective ‘party on the ground’ and that it was ‘one of the stakeholders’ with most ‘influence on the peace process’.

The non-governmental nature of this actor was helpful because it allowed to claim that dealings with him were not in breach of the international recognition consensus.

In any case, Haftar’s effectiveness-based international recognition worked as a self-fulfilling prophecy in consolidating a diplomatic fait accompli at least until the 2019-20 civil war.

Thirdly, the de facto veto-player role of Haftar’s LAAF and other Libyan armed non-state actors raised the dilemma between coherence and inclusivity in conflict mediation and peacemaking processes.

This applied most notably to the mediation efforts undertaken by the UN Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) after the establishment of the GNA, when the UN had thrown all its weight behind this government and was thus considered one-sided by other Libyan players.

From mid-2017 onward, though, concerns about the counterproductive side-effects of this approach led UNSMIL to reconsider and reframe its mandate putting a greater emphasis on engagement with ‘all Libyan political actors’ and ‘bridging the inter-Libyan divide’.

This change of method was influenced by the Special Representative of the Secretary-General Ghassan Salamé’s preference for bottom-up mediation and grassroots dialogue initiatives involving non-state actors, as part of his roadmap for the Libyan national conference that was supposed to be held in the spring of 2019.

The aim of such a wide-ranging preparatory consultation process was that the national conference endorsed a pre-negotiated transition plan that enjoyed the wide domestic consensus and domestic recognition that the Libyan Political Agreement and the GNA had lacked three years earlier.

A collapsing transition roadmap and yet another authority split (2020-22)

Some lessons from the previous decade’s international government recognition and peacemaking dilemmas seemed to have been learnt at the outset of the new transition stage upon the end of the 2019-20 civil war.

The page was definitely turned regarding coherence on the international recognition of an insufficiently effective GNA. Inclusivity was the name of the game in the LPDF launched by the UN in November 2020, whose 75 participants were supposed to represent ‘the full social and political spectrum of Libyan society’.

The first outcome of this dialogue was what UNSMIL described as a ‘roadmap to credible, inclusive and democratic national elections’.

This comprised both parliamentary and presidential elections, which were supposed to be held jointly on the symbolic date of the 70th anniversary of Libyan independence, 24 December 2021.

In addition, the same LPDF appointed the GNU as a new interim, unified Libyan government for the pre-election period, electing Dabeiba as Prime Minister. Dabeiba’s cabinet stood out as the country’ first single government since 2014. Unlike in the negotiation process leading to the establishment of the GNA in 2015, this time domestic recognition took precedence over international recognition.

Furthermore, the former was fully accomplished in institutional terms, as the GNU won parliamentary confidence from the HoR with a sweeping majority in March 2021 –which also put an end to the existence of the eastern parallel government–.

A different question is whether the LPDF delegates, the HoR members and the Libyan political elite they represented could genuinely embody and provide domestic recognition in the sense of the broader social contract.

UN peacemaking continued to rely on an elite bargain, and internal ‘power dynamics which mirror those that followed the establishment of the GNA in 2016’ could be observed again soon after the inauguration of the GNU.

Also, and putting legitimacy aside, the GNU’s effectiveness in terms of territorial control and monopoly over the use of force remained as partial and patchy as that of the GNA. Areas of limited statehood continued to characterise Libya’s governance.

Indeed, as predicted by several Libya analysts, the LPDF’s roadmap was doomed to crumble in less than a year’s time. Its weaknesses emerged in the first place in relation to the electoral process, for which the LPDF failed to establish a legal framework.

This, compounded with the more fundamental absence of a constitution, made longstanding disagreements resurface over the sequence of elections, ie, the order in which parliamentary and presidential elections should take place, and whether a constitutional referendum should necessarily precede them.

Seizing the opportunity provided by such a legal vacuum, the HoR speaker –and Haftar ally– Aguila Saleh issued a unilateral and skewed ‘presidential electoral law’ in September 2021. Besides not having been approved in a regular parliamentary vote, Saleh’s law was controversial for two main reasons:

(i) first, it reversed the LPDF’s agreement to hold presidential and parliamentary elections jointly by establishing that the former occur ahead of the latter; and

(ii) second, it loosened eligibility criteria in a way that allowed both Haftar and Saleh himself to run for the presidency –while maintaining their existing official positions–.

Two additional problematic developments that concurred with Saleh’s manoeuvring were the announcements of the presidential candidacies of Prime Minister Dabeiba and the son of the former dictator, Saif al-Gaddafi.

The former thereby reneged on an earlier commitment not to do so, while the latter, wanted by the International Criminal Court, provoked an intense backlash in many circles inside and outside Libya. Political tensions were thus running high when, three weeks before the election date of 24 December 2021, the High National Election Commission suspended the whole process.

Just two months later, the GNU also lost its brief status as Libya’s unified government. With the electoral process frozen and the GNU’s interim mandate extended sine die under the leadership of a Dabeiba willing to perpetuate himself in power, in February 2022 the HoR took the initiative to replace this cabinet by a new one headed by Bashagha.

At the end of the 2019-20 war, the GNA’s former Interior Minister had struck a political deal with his hitherto rival Saleh –and thereby with Haftar– which resulted in both Bashagha and Saleh leading what looked like the favourite list for the GNU at the LPDF. The alienation of this duo/trio due to the LPDF’s unexpected election of Dabeiba would culminate with the swearing-in at the HoR of Bashagha’s so-called Government of National Stability (GNS) in March 2022.

Unsurprisingly, Dabeiba’s GNU refused to cede power to this competitor, resisting political pressure and stopping –with some Turkish support– a budding military offensive on Tripoli to dislodge it in the summer.

Clashes in the capital in the summer of 2022 heightened the international community’s fearsthat Libya’s new government split and legitimacy crisis further destabilise the country, provoking a return to civil war.

The international and regional political conjuncture is not pushing in that direction at the moment, though.

The Turkish-Russian entente that greatly contributed to putting an end to the 2019-20 war has been matched by a wave of reconciliations between the regional supporters of Libya’s opposing conflict parties, including the end of the Qatar blockade by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and the mending of ties between Egypt and Turkey. Yet, the present stability reflects ‘a stalemate rather than a settlement’.

In this fragile context, in September of 2022 the Senegalese Abdoulaye Bathily was appointed the new Special Representative of the Secretary-General and head of UNSMIL.

Bathily called for the organisation of the postponed elections to be sped up so as to avoid putting the country ‘at risk of partition’. Then, following an extensive series of consultations in February 2023, he has proposed to set up a high-level steering panel in charge of agreeing the legal framework as well as a time-bound roadmap for presidential and legislative polls to be held in 2023.

Conclusions

While foreign players have certainly had a crucial role in freezing or unfreezing the Libyan conflict at various points in time, the key to solving it remains first and foremost domestic.

This is no proxy war, and both the Libyan political elite and armed non-state actors seem overall content with the status quo given the currently limited levels of violence and, not least, the rising global prices of energy since the outbreak of Russia’s war on Ukraine. That explains the general lack of a genuine commitment to relaunch the transition and electoral roadmap.

Last summer’s protests by disgruntled Libyan youth in multiple cities from Tobruk to Tripoli were indeed directed against the entire national political elite, revealing more profound domestic recognition and social contract issues that will affect any future conflict settlement and Libyan government.

The international community has learnt only half of the lessons from the past decade of Libyan government splits and international recognition dilemmas (2014-15, 2016-21 and 2022-now).

Upon the end of the 2019-20 civil war, at the time of the establishment of the LPDF, it was already widely assumed that domestic recognition should always take precedence over international recognition, that governance legitimacy cannot thrive by itself without effectiveness, and that coherence around international government recognition positions may stand in the way of the inclusivity –and success– of conflict mediation and peacemaking.

However, the problem of the now-embraced inclusivity –common to both the LPDF and Bathily’s new high-level electoral steering panel– is that it remains partial and vulnerable to hijacking from members of the Libyan political elite who have little interest in a successful transition.

Overcoming this catch-22 situation is certainly not easy, but in any case, the only way ahead hangs on democratic elections. Attempts to form a viable, unified Libyan government by other means have repeatedly failed.

In order to actively support UNSMIL and Bathily’s plan of holding elections by the end of 2023, the EU’s efforts in the coming months should focus on ensuring intra-EU and broader international political unity to deter spoilers.

At the same time, if it materialises, the national reconciliation conference for Libya that the African Union has announced it is preparing to host should also receive strong EU backing.

Finally, complementary dialogue formats should be considered in order to give some international oxygen to an increasingly neglected Libyan youth and civil society.

***

Irene Fernández-Molina is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations, University of Exeter

________________

Elcano Royal Institute

Irene Fernández-Molina

Theme

In Libya, domestic authority fractures have become a constant in the midst of a fluid conflict. The practices of international recognition of governments pursued since 2011 have faced dilemmas stemming from three dichotomies:

(a) international vs domestic recognition;

(b) legitimacy vs effectiveness; and

(c) coherence vs inclusivity in conflict mediation and peacemaking.

Summary

Twelve years after the spark of the revolution and the international military intervention that overthrew the regime of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, Libya is yet to see the light at the end of the tunnel of protracted turmoil and intermittent civil war.

Parliamentary and presidential elections were planned to take place on 24 December 2021; however, three days earlier, the High National Election Commission suspended the entire process.

Agreed by the Libyan Political Dialogue Forum (LPDF), this electoral roadmap provided some hope for Libyans to overcome conflict and fragmentation. Since its failure, the country has seen a new government split along the lines of the authority fractures in 2014-15 and 2016-21.

Two parallel cabinets are operating again in Tripolitania (West) and Cyrenaica/Barqa (East) since February-March 2022, with the ensuing increased risk of return to violent conflict.

Analysis

Background and analytical reconsiderations of the Libyan conflict

Over the past 12 years, Libya has gone through the overlapping upheavals of revolution, international military intervention and civil war in three episodes (February-October 2011, May 2014-December 2015 and April 2019-October 2020), as well as relatively quieter interludes devoted to stabilisation, political transition, security sector reform (SSR) and state-building attempts (October 2011-May 2014, December 2015-April 2019 and October 2020-now).

Yet, at no time have the latter efforts resulted in a sustainable conflict settlement. Against a backdrop of deepening political fragmentation and hybridisation of security governance in the country –due to the blurred boundaries between state and non-state actors–, the failure of conflict resolution has been conspicuously associated, at the institutional level, with recurring authority splits and international recognition contests.

The 2014 fracture stemmed from a controversy over the extension of the mandate as a legislature of the 2012-elected General National Congress (GNC), as well as the validity of the results of the elections that were held to replace it by a new House of Representatives (HoR).

The two rival parliaments ended up operating in parallel from Tripoli and Tobruk, respectively, with each of them sustaining its corresponding appointed government. Furthermore, as Libya’s second civil war (May 2014-December 2015) broke out, each of them received armed support from armed non-state actors remobilised around the coalitions Libyan Dawn (pro-GNC) and Operation Dignity (pro-HoR), the latter led by the military strongman Khalifa Haftar and what the HoR would designate as the ‘Libyan National Army’, also known as the Libyan Arab Armed Forces (LAAF).

A second government recognition controversy emerged just as this one drew to a close. In late 2015 a Government of National Accord (GNA) was established in Tripoli under the terms of the UN-led Libyan Political Agreement.

Yet, while backed –and arguably created– by a strong international recognition consensus, the GNA’s domestic recognition was never complete, impaired by the denial of consent from the HoR and its armed allies.

As a result, an eastern parallel government and administration remained in place operating from Bayda, though with a decreasing political salience compared with Haftar, his LAAF and the HoR itself. The third and last government split is the one that has signalled the deadlock of the transition roadmap following the end of the third civil war (April 2019-October 2020).

The unification and exclusivity achieved by the interim Government of National Unity (GNU) designated in March 2021 by the LPDF, under the leadership of Abdelhamid Dabeiba, were short-lived.

A new eastern competitor came up just one year later amid disagreements over the irregular prolongation of the GNU’s mandate in the absence of parliamentary elections, as the HoR appointed former Interior Minister Fathi Bashagha to form yet another government.

This pattern of divisions and polarisation at the executive and legislative levels has become a constant in the midst of a fluid conflict whose core cleavages and framing have significantly changed since 2011.

While the collective identity and purpose of most armed non-state actors  was primarily local in origin and reliant on their ‘social embeddedness’, their larger-scale positioning within the broader game of the conflict owed much to the external recognition and support they received at different points in time.

This applies to the revolution vs the Gaddafi regime framing of the 2011 civil war, which translated into a revolutionaries vs counterrevolutionaries dichotomy in the post-war transitional politics, as well as to the overlapping West vs East and Islamists vs secularists oppositions that have prevailed since the 2014-15 civil war.

The latter discursive framework, in particular, was always in fact less reflective of the actual makeup of the two sides and armed alliances –both of which have comprised an assorted range of non-Islamist and Islamist forces– than the ideological leanings of the regional backers of each side, ie, Turkey and Qatar for the GNC/Libyan Dawn and later the GNA, and Egypt, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia in the case of the HoD/Operation Dignity and Haftar’s LAAF.

In fact, the most fundamental and longstanding political cleavage shaping the post-2011 confrontation in Libya has been one between horizontal and vertical modes of authoritarian governance.

Tripolitania has been dominated by a form of authoritarianism ‘populist in character and often portraying itself as revolutionary’ that ‘allows space for horizontal arrangements between rivals and a small degree of tolerance for political initiative on the part of citizens and local leaders’.

On the other hand, in contrast to this relatively more pluralistic and unpredictable governance, the alternative model consolidated by Haftar and his supporters in Cyrenaica is a ‘more vertical’ one, ‘which tolerates almost no contestation, even moderate’.

When it comes to the violent conflict dynamics, it is similarly useful to reconsider the analytical lenses through which the international community has approached Libya over these years in at least two ways.

First, while this is certainly an internationalised civil war, and one that has become more conspicuously so in its 2019-20 iteration due to the overt foreign (para)military intervention of Russia –through the Wagner Group– and Turkey, describing it as a proxy war is inaccurate and misleading inasmuch as it underrates domestic agency.

In fact, rather than acting at the initiative or on behalf of regional or global powers, Libya’s ‘local actors played a key role in internationalising the conflict by soliciting and manipulating foreign support for their own interests and agendas’.

From a political economy perspective, the autonomy of such local actors, including armed non-state actors, has been preserved and reinforced thanks to the persisting rentier nature of the Libyan state and its institutional bits and pieces.

Oil and oil revenues managed by the Central Bank of Libya have kept flowing even in the shakiest conditions to all sorts of (para)state and double-hatted local actors.

Secondly, rather than pigeonholing the country into the problematic category of failed states, the outcome of Libya’s deepening fragmentation may be better understood as the consolidation of multiple areas of limited statehood.

Defined as ‘parts of the territory or policy areas in which the central government lacks the capacity to implement decisions and/or its monopoly over the means of violence is challenged’, the point about areas of limited statehood is that they are ‘neither ungoverned nor ungovernable’,[4] and not always necessarily associated with violent conflict.

International government recognition dilemmas and pitfalls (2011-19)

One further aspect of the international involvement in post-2011 Libya that deserves closer attention is the broad range of practices of international recognition of governments that have been pursued during the course of this conflict, ranging from the macro to the micro level, and from highly formalised procedures with legal implications to purposefully unofficial modes of interaction.

The repertoire includes declaratory, diplomatic, informal engagement, intergovernmental cooperation and support practices. 

First, the mismatch between international and internal recognition has been prominent in situations where the former has preceded the latter, yet the externally-backed government has proved eventually unable to achieve a viable social contract with all the key societal groups and political stakeholders inside the country.

This domestic recognition deficit has affected, to a greater or lesser extent, all the successive internationally-recognised governments in post-2011 Libya. It was already a concern for the National Transitional Council (NTC) established in Benghazi upon the anti-Gaddafi uprising in February 2011.

Originally conceived as a tool of rebel diplomacy vis-à-vis the international community, the NTC, in parallel, had to provide governance in areas under rebel control during the 2011 civil war, and eventually became the country’s government for nearly 10 months after the civil war came to an end.

Tensions between the two roles were inevitable. Still, the NTC mitigated them thanks to a mix of revolutionary legitimacy and the legal effects of its increasingly formal international recognition, which enabled it to secure access to some of Libya’s frozen assets abroad and thereby continue to pay state salaries at home.

The gap between international and domestic recognition was greater in the case of the GNA established in late 2015.

The reason for this was the rush that pushed a powerful range of international actors –including multilateral organisations such as the UN, the EU, the Arab League and the African Union– to ‘pledge [their] support’ for this would-be unified central government even prior to the actual signature by Libyan actors of the Libyan Political Agreement (Skhirat agreement) that founded it.

The urge mostly came from the Western crisis approach to both the capture of the Sirte region by the Islamic State (IS) group and the increase in migrant sea crossings from the Libyan coast to Italy.

A regular Libyan government was needed as a partner for international anti-terrorism and anti-migration cooperation efforts to be effectively, and legally, boosted. Yet, the initial strong international and EU endorsement of the GNA was not met with a similar level of domestic sanctioning.

The power-sharing elite deal was spoiled as the HoR –the country’s (transitional) legislative authority in accordance with the Libyan Political Agreement– denied consent to the GNA.

Besides a new West-East government split, the GNA’s domestic recognition shortage was reflected in its very struggle to physically set foot in and operate from Tripoli, exerting effective rule over the armed non-state actors that controlled the capital’s security.

***

Irene Fernández-Molina is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations, University of Exeter

________________

Elcano Royal Institute

Jason Pack & Stefano Marcuzzi

Part 2) … Continues

On Feb. 5, 2023, the regional spokesman for the U.S. Department of State, Samuel Warburg, said that the U.S.’s current priority in Libya is to “achieve Libyan aspirations to have a transparent management of oil revenues.”

While the U.S. undoubtedly has an interest in securing the transparent management of oil revenues and budgets in Libya — both as a way to secure greater stability in Libya and to ensure Russia is not benefitting from the sector — there is little to suggest that there has been any major shift in approach or a significant increase in political capital being thrown at it by Washington.

As a result, there is unlikely to be much progress towards establishing such a mechanism, especially while the broader political process remains so opaque, and the U.S. is only minimally involved on the Libya file at present.

As such, Warburg’s statement can be interpreted as showing that the U.S. will be confining itself to the margins of the Libyan elections debate and allowing the U.N. to call the shots and generate political will on that file.

Opponents of the American approach have successfully articulated a narrative that “the exclusion of GNS representatives from the proposed LSCO raised doubts in Cyrenaica that the LSCO could satisfy the grievances of that region.”

The NOC decision to transfer $8 billion of oil revenues from its Libyan Foreign Bank account to the CBL in mid-April, in return for the GNU agreeing to disburse 34 billion LYD in emergency funding for the oil sector, triggered further accusations that the NOC and CBL were politicized in favor of the GNU.

This, however, is itself a biased way of looking at the problem, inasmuch as the CBL and NOC were working with the legitimate government to source funding for the energy sector, albeit through non-transparent means. They have mostly done what they needed to do to keep oil flowing, while other actors have sought to turn the oil off to grab headlines and engage in blackmail.

In early July 2022, HoR Speaker Aguila Saleh unilaterally attempted to appoint Hibri as the “head” of the whole CBL, while conflict also resumed between the bank’s two branches over fund allocations, with the eastern CBL warning that it would be forced to resume printing its own Libyan dinars if Tripoli does not provide it with further liquidity. These events fueled greater mutual mistrust and recriminations.

On July 17, Hibri issued an official communication — co-signed by the chairman of the Administrative Control Authority (ACA) appointed by the HoR, Abdussalam al-Hassi, and the head of the AB in al-Bayda, Omar Abd Rabbu — which rejected the U.S.-proposed financial mechanism, deeming it “disrespectful of Libya’s sovereignty.”

Despite repeated attempts by Norland to revitalize talks throughout August and September, efforts to establish a more neutral oversight of the management of Libyan revenues and reunify the banking system appear to have become irrevocably bogged down, as other internationals have not supported the process, while inside Libya each side has scrambled to blame the other and control the narrative.

This is an exact repeat of what happened over the slated December 2021 elections: No conflict actor wished to be the first to announce publicly that elections would not be happening and each sought to spin the failure as a result of his opponents’ actions. Myriad conspiracy theories abound on Libyan Facebook pages about the role of the CBL and its leadership in prolonging and benefiting from the ongoing political conflict and bifurcation of institutions.

The narrative war of “rival banks” forces internationals to meet with Hibri and to treat him as a major player and almost a co-equal to Kabir when he clearly is not. Similar dynamics played out with Hifter from 2016-19 when he leveraged official meetings with European officials for increased international standing, which he later used to further destabilize Libya.

In late November 2022, the HoR decided to sack Hibri and appoint Marai al-Barassi to replace him, both as the head of the eastern CBL and as deputy governor of the whole Central Bank. Barassi is a banker who has held many senior posts in the past, including chairman of al-Wahda Bank in Derna, and is considered very close to Gen. Hifter’s clan of supporters. He stands accused of funneling funds to Saddam Hifter.

The scandal that is said to have brought Hibri down does not so much relate to his plans to revalue the dinar or the illicit Russian-printed dinars seized in Malta with his signature on them. His opponents say it has to do with embezzling funds from his role in the Derna and Benghazi Reconstruction Committee. Hibri says that it has to do with his failure to transfer to the HoR the 2022 budget that it passed for the rivalBashagha government. This latter version is more credible, especially as no evidence has emerged of embezzlement from Reconstruction Committee funds.

Simultaneously to Hibri’s ousting, rumors surfaced on social media that CBL board members Mohammed al-Mukhtar and Abdul Rahman Habil submitted their resignations to the office of the speaker of the HoR. This step was engineered by opponents of Kabir as it could legally lead to the dissolution of the CBL board, which currently lacks a quorum.

Wishing to take control of the narrative, the CBL has responded by making more financial disclosures and publishing more information about annual expenditures and the letters of credit that it issues. It is also increasingly posting about its activities online and on Facebook and keeping the Libyan public up-to-date about issues like gold reserves and public sector salaries.

There are some genuinely useful nuggets released in this manner; however, much of the more interesting information is published only in Arabic and in formats that are obscure and hard to cross-check or verify. That said, disclosures like the 2022 expenditure report released on Jan. 4, 2023, do appear to spark constructive debate about public sector inefficiency on Libya social media.

They also allow the CBL to frame their new disclosures as an “important transparency initiative,” even though they actually demonstrate how untransparent Libya’s public expenditures really are and that a significant expansion in opaque public spending happened from 2021 to 2022.

This current impasse is the logical conclusion of the Enduring Disorder playing out against the CBL. At present, the governor fears that any of his actions will be criticized as illegal by Libya’s AB or legal supervisory bodies. In the first week of January 2023, the ACA did just that, as it requested a freeze of all banking sector transactions until the HoR approved a budget for the 2023 fiscal year.

As such, there are optics challenges from partisan bodies like the ACA for CBL spending on anything beyond salaries. Despite these challenges, at the time of writing it seems that normal approval procedures for letters of credit are continuing and that expenditures in 2023 are set to increase to new heights.

Towards the end of January, it was revealed that HoR Speaker Aguila Saleh had issued a decision requesting Kabir to authorize the disbursement of a 6 billion LYD loan to the GNS for the LNA General Command. However, it seems highly unlikely that Kabir will agree to disburse such a loan to eastern Libya outside of the CBL reunification process, even as part of a broader economic deal.

The Libyan banking sector is clearly beset by myriad paradoxes. The private banking sector has grown ten-fold in the last five years while the public banking sector appears to be stymied and sclerotic, yet its transparency about spending has an optic of improving, while actual opaque public spending is occurring at unprecedented levels.

The forces of disorder and corruption win so long as there is a brutal narrative war over who gets to control Libya’s economy. At the time of publication, progress on the proposed reunification of the CBL has stalled and there is no movement over appointing new board members.

The emergence of a renewed governance divide and ongoing disputes over the state budget serve as indications that the eastern authorities will seek to generate and spend funds directly. It is evident that both lending and the printing of banknotes have resumed in the east; however, the degree to which they are in circulation remains unknown.

The fact that Hibri was removed and replaced with a bank executive known for his closeness to Saddam Hifter indicates that the funding taps are about to be turned back on and that illicit money is likely to start flowing into eastern coffers.

Rumors and misinformation campaigns alongside genuine personnel reshuffling will only contribute to further division and polarization over the role of the CBL. Kabir has previously headed off more threatening challenges and he is truly indispensable to various international actors, like the United States Treasury Department and the IMF, which seek to prevent the collapse of the entire Libyan financial system and to guarantee that they have legitimate interlocutors with whom to parley.

Hence, the grand sum totality of these moves does not necessarily weaken Kabir’s position, even as they perilously weaken the entire banking sector. At the time of writing, the only man recognized by Kabir as his deputy (Hibri) has now been dismissed and Kabir lacks working relationships with his other board members and deputies.

Even his relationship with his erstwhile protégé, Tarik Youssef, is said to have frayed. Amidst this uncertainty over Hibri’s alleged corruption regarding the reconstruction of Derna and Benghazi, it is possible that his two pledges from 2020 will come undone — namely for the eastern CBL and LNA to stop taking unauthorized loans from commercial banks and stop importing Russian-printed banknotes.

In short, a media war continues over control of Libya’s banking sector that has spilled over into a political battle tangential to the battle over elections and a new interim government. Western Libyan “official” institutions have continued to control Libya’s finances in a non-transparent way, while eastern “parallel” institutions have claimed that they have a right to be included in decision-making processes as if they were representatives of legitimate national institutions, which they are not.

This dynamic has allowed eastern Libyan power players like the Hifter clan and Aguila Saleh to manipulate eastern CBL personnel and procedures to extract funds. Meanwhile, the narrative war over control of the bank extends to how the “reunification process” is being presented to the world. Negotiations take place behind closed doors and then the various sides of the conflict provide “spin” over who is doing what and who is to blame for the lack of progress.

This situation has come therefore to increasingly mirror the dysfunction in Libya’s institutions prior to the Skhirat Agreement establishing the GNA — and in fact, it illustrates the dynamics of the Enduring Disorder writ large.

Although cooperation would be in all sides’ best interests, foreign meddling, a lack of international and domestic consensus, and a desire to score points in the media by blaming one’s opponents for a conspiracy have inhibited all progress on reunification.

***

Jason Pack is a former non-resident scholar at MEI, author of Libya and the Global Enduring Disorder, and the president of LibyaAnalysis LLC. He is the Director of the NATO & THE GLOBAL ENDURING DISORDER Project and a Senior Analyst for Emerging Challenges at the NATO Defense College Foundation.

Stefano Marcuzzi is a Research Fellow at the Center for Higher Defense Studies (CASD), Rome, a Senior Analyst at Libya Analysis LLC, an Adjunct Fellow at University College Dublin (UCD) and Boston University (BU), and an Emerging Challenges Analyst at the NATO Defense College Foundation (NDFC), Rome. He is the author of The EU, NATO and the Libya Conflict. Anatomy of a Failure.

________________

Jason Pack & Stefano Marcuzzi

Part 2) Enter Hifter, Trump, and Twitter: The Struggle for Reunification and Transparency

Due to its semi-sovereignty, opacity, and critical importance to the post-Gadhafi economy, the CBL has become central to the narrative wars waged by various conflict actors, especially Turkey, France, the Gulf states, and Russia.

In this section, we examine the steps taken toward reunification and greater transparency, the key role and proposals of the U.S. and the broader international community, and how the whole process got bogged down by competing conflict narratives and dynamics emanating from the Enduring Disorder.

The role of the CBL in Libya’s economic and political life was a key — though often overlooked — driver of the April 2019-June 2020 war for Tripoli.

Much of Hifter’s rhetoric involved claims that he would take over the CBL and change how Libya’s wealth was distributed. Even though he lost the war, the post-war settlement, hashed out through the U.N. and various mediated east-west meetings, such as the Ras Lanuf summit, required the CBL to

1) assume the debt of the eastern commercial banks, but also to

2) reunify and reform itself. It is unclear if the first point has happened. Yet even agreeing to it in principle sets quite a precedent — arguably a first in world history, where the winning side of a civil war has agreed to pay off the debts of the losing side, considering the rebels’ military expenses as legitimate government expenditure.

The second point rests in an even more ambiguous state. Rather, 2021 and 2022 have witnessed the veneer of reforms, audits, and reunification with various vague pronouncements.

A range of conflict actors have presented the international community with a fig leaf of banking reforms, just as the 2021 electoral process was a complex act of multifaceted window dressing — designed by multiple conflict actors to mask that the underlying power realities were not in fact changing.

During the Tripoli war, the CBL had paid the salaries of armed groups on both sides — considering them legitimate government expenditures, just as it had during the 2014-15 civil war. But this time — in the absence of an approved national budget — the bank directly funded the GNA above and beyond its prior spending commitments via a vague reference in the Skhirat Agreement about extraordinary “financial arrangements.”

In addition to its close government ties, the CBL was allegedly connected to three other entities:

1) Certain global PR and lobbying firms hired by the GNA but paid for, and utilized, by the CBL (Mercury LLC and others);

2) Tripolitanian armed groups like the Nawasi or Rada that at different times have controlled the territory that the CBL building is located on and intimidated CBL staff, leading to accommodation of their demands;

3) Islamist-aligned political figures in Misrata and Khums, which, according to myriad rumors in the anti-Islamist milieu, were closely tied to the Central Bank governor.

Given the preexistence of these networks connecting CBL staff to compromised actors and the widespread belief that access to country’s wealth was being distributed via preferential access to letters of credit, removing Kabir and taking control of the CBL in Tripoli was a key propaganda driver and possibly even a genuine motivating factor for Hifter’s failed assault on Tripoli in 2019-20.

The underlying causes of the war are rooted in Russian, Emirati, Saudi, and Trumpian desires to see the ascendence of anti-Islamist strongman and the inability of Western democracies to coordinate consensus solutions.

Although CBL reform was merely a faux casus belli for pro-Libyan National Army (LNA) social media, previous oil blockades in 2018 had actually been resolved via U.N. mediation with the promise of a CBL audit.

Therefore, in the wake of the Tripoli war, when a new roadmap to national elections and constitutional transition was discussed in the Libyan Political Dialogue Forum (LPDF) in autumn 2020, the reunification and reform of the western and eastern central banks was presented in the Economic Working Group, which is a follow-up committee from the Berlin process, as a necessary condition for sustained peacemaking. However, progress on this front has been glacial.

Much of the politics of our current era is a battle over narrative. In Libya, the battle over the CBL is no different. In late 2021, as a condition for the ceasefire to hold, Kabir and Ali al-Hibri, then head of the CBL’s eastern branch, agreed on a four-stage plan to move forward with the unification of the two central banks, detailing the plan during a subsequent meeting in Tunis on Jan. 20, 2022.

Western players, particularly the U.S. and the U.K., gave strong support to the initiative, as evidenced by a number of official contacts between the U.S. Ambassador to Libya Richard Norland, the U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Eric Meyer, the U.K. Ambassador to Libya Caroline Hurndall, and Kabir and Hibri throughout February.

However, the plan was largely part of an attempt to control the narrative rather than unify the bank. Connected to this process was the Deloitte audit of the CBL and the separately contracted and paid for Deloitte reunification project.

The big four auditing firms had all previously declined the opportunity to audit the bank and according to knowledgeable sources Deloitte’s efforts have been based entirely on figures that the CBL has provided.

In short, the audit has not been forensic but rather about narrative making. An expert we spoke to postulated that “the U.N. calculated that the audit was best utilized as a route to reunification rather than accountability.”

By putting the cart before the horse, it has delivered neither. However, by the end of March, even the narrative making process had slowed down. Kabir came under pressure from actors in Tripolitania who opposed the unification of the banking sector because it would cause the western CBL to shoulder significant debts incurred by the eastern branch during Hifter’s Tripoli campaign.

On Feb. 21, Abd al-Salam al-Safrani, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood-aligned Justice and Construction Party collective within the HSC, generally considered to be allies of the CBL, even called for Kabir’s removal.

At the same time, Kabir overtly supported the new Government of National Unity (GNU) Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah and devised ways around the 1/12th budget agreement to fund numerous of Dbeibah’s populist policies (like marriage grants and the restarting of construction projects) designed to channel financial incentives to his supporters.

Cyrenaican players once again lamented Kabir’s “partisan attitude,” and a desire for a change in the leadership of the CBL was central in the negotiations and agreements between Libyan and foreign actors challenging the legitimacy of Dbeibah’s government after the failed December 2021 elections and supporting the formation of the Government of National Stability (GNS), to be led by former GNA Interior Minister Fathi Bashagha.

Bashagha has been an outspoken critic of Kabir, although, interestingly, he and Kabir had worked together quite seamlessly when Bashagha was interior minister during the GNA.

To prevent the CBL reunification process from entirely losing momentum, Amb. Norland proposed a mechanism to stop Libya’s political crisis from spilling over into economic warfare that would deprive Libyans of salaries, subsidized goods, and state investment — as well as hitting global energy markets.

Norland dubbed it the Mechanism for Short Term Financial, Economic and Energy Dependability, or Mustafeed — which in Arabic means “beneficiary” and “breadwinner.”

On June 6, 2022, the U.S. ambassador detailed his plan at the Economic Working Group on Libya. He envisaged a so-called “Libya Special Committee for Oversight” (LSCO) that would provide oversight of Libyan finances and ensure NOC revenues are distributed transparently and that critical public needs were prioritized (salaries, critical infrastructure maintenance, medical services, etc.).

LSCO would be managed by a private independent audit firm and a selection of representatives of Libyan authorities.2 However, the Mustafeed concept was opposed by U.S. allies, especially Egypt, and the lack of unanimity in the international community allowed Libyan actors to waylay the idea.

Norland acknowledged that it would be up to Libyan stakeholders to decide whether this mechanism should be implemented, but insisted that there were compelling reasons for leaders in Libya to ensure that oil revenues benefit the Libyan people — and do so in a transparent fashion that builds social trust.

This view was indirectly supported by then Special Advisor to the Secretary-General Stephanie Williams. However, just as with previous proposals for an international financial commission, many key Libyan stakeholders — the status quo parties — felt that a lack of transparency and the overall conditions of the Global Enduring Disorder allow them to continue in their roles indefinitely and with their patronage networks intact, while too much transparency would likely damage their sinecures.

Grasping that transparency is the key to solving the intertwined Libyan financial and political conflicts, to complement this proposed financial mechanism the U.S. also pushed to increase transparency within the CBL at a more operational and technical level, and assisted in refining the Annual Monetary Plan for 2022.

Over the course of 2022, more meetings followed between Kabir and Hibri, often under the auspices of the U.S. embassy, which fostered the transferring of cash funds to the eastern CBL to be disbursed to all the commercial banks in Cyrenaica, and the release of the first CBL Extraordinary Annual Report — a document produced jointly by the Tripoliand eastern-based branches of the CBL. This unsurprisingly contained little useful information and is available only in Arabic.

Despite the U.S.’s best intentions to craft an inclusive process, Dbeibah’s opponents flat out refused to work with Mustafeed because the process involved dealing with the GNU. The U.S. remains committed to pushing the Mustafeed mechanism or related economic approaches.

***

Jason Pack is a former non-resident scholar at MEI, author of Libya and the Global Enduring Disorder, and the president of LibyaAnalysis LLC. He is the Director of the NATO & THE GLOBAL ENDURING DISORDER Project and a Senior Analyst for Emerging Challenges at the NATO Defense College Foundation.

Stefano Marcuzzi is a Research Fellow at the Center for Higher Defense Studies (CASD), Rome, a Senior Analyst at Libya Analysis LLC, an Adjunct Fellow at University College Dublin (UCD) and Boston University (BU), and an Emerging Challenges Analyst at the NATO Defense College Foundation (NDFC), Rome. He is the author of The EU, NATO and the Libya Conflict. Anatomy of a Failure.

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Jalel Harchaoui

Central Intelligence Agency Director Bill Burns made whirlwind visits to Benghazi and Tripoli on January 12, asking contending Libyan leaders to expel roughly a thousand Russian personnel and help organize nationwide elections. But despite being the most senior U.S. official to set foot in Libya in years, Burns is unlikely to get his wishes any time soon.

What stands in the way is an intricate deadlock that has lingered across the divided country for months. Part of that can be attributed to the geographic distribution of hydrocarbons, which favors rebel commander Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar and his so-called Libyan National Army. The Field Marshal’s failure in his 2019-2020 attempt to take Tripoli did little to jeopardize his control in the oil-rich east and south. Today, irrespective of Burns’ requests, Haftar refuses to share his strategic territories with Libyan rivals. In doing so, he enjoys the support of not only Russia but also U.S. partners Egypt and Saudi Arabia, not to mention France and Greece. Meanwhile, in the country’s northwest, Turkey uses its military presence to keep incumbent Prime Minister Abd al Hamid Dabaiba in power, long past the expiration of his mandate.

Against such a rigid backdrop, any attempt to force a diplomatic breakthrough could upset the ongoing calm and plunge parts of the country back into prolonged conflict. Yet, if Washington is serious about Burns’ objectives, it should convince leaders on both sides that sticking to their current practices and strategies will cost them. In addition to coercive measures targeting Libyan decision-makers, this requires bringing Washington’s main regional partners, namely Turkey, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates, on board. 

Getting Better at Dividing the Enemy

Since his military debacle on the outskirts of the Libyan capital almost three years ago, Haftar has proved unexpectedly resilient in weathering financial strains and attracting new allies. In 2021, mere months after the Tripoli civil war ended, a U.N.-backed process designated Dabaiba as prime minister for a brief term in Tripoli pending general elections in December of that year. Haftar’s camp helped Dabaiba win the interim prime ministership, then weakened him by refusing to give him further recognition or even permission to visit Benghazi. The U.N.’s election plans eventually crumbled — allowing Dabaiba to hold onto office in the west. Both sides proceeded to build up their respective military forces while engaging in some economic cooperation through an Emirati-sponsored dialogue between Prime Minister Dabaiba’s nephew, Ibrahim, and Saddam Haftar, the most assertive of the veteran commander’s six sons.

Since his accession to the prime ministership, Dabaiba has often proclaimed a willingness to use his influence over the state’s ministries and economic institutions to accommodate other political factions — but regardless, his staunchest foes want him out of Tripoli. In February 2022, the eastern-based House of Representatives, which is more or less aligned with the Libyan National Army, appointed a rival prime minister: Fathi Bashagha. A prominent anti-Haftar leader during the 2019-2020 war, Bashagha, like Dabaiba, hails from the western city of Misrata.

After the fighting ended, Bashagha and other high-profile northwesterners did a U-turn by embracing the Field Marshal and rejecting the authority of the new boss in Tripoli. Several times last year, armed groups in the city tried to help Bashagha challenge Dabaiba. One key Bashagha ally in that context was the Nawassi Brigade, which then controlled prime areas along the waterfront, including the commercial port.

On August 27, when Nawassi and other militias clashed with their pro-Dabaiba counterparts, Ankara played a decisive role in helping maintain the sitting prime minister in power. According to three Tripoli-based sources, not only did Turkey provide coordination, advice, and surveillance, but it also deployed its TB2 drones to assist pro-Dabaiba militias in more accurately targeting their adversaries.

Now, Nawassi’s and other pro-Bashagha leaders no longer even have access to downtown Tripoli. “Fathi Bashagha is our dearest friend,” Ankara’s chief diplomat explained later to the press. “But we informed him that, in our opinion, Dabaiba’s current administration is the legitimate one … until a new one comes along.”

Turkey Really Needs Cyrenaica

Notwithstanding all its stubborn support for Dabaiba, Ankara harbors many economic and geopolitical aspirations in Libya that will require sway in the eastern province of Cyrenaica. To realize them, Turkey prefers to woo the leaders already in place there rather than resort to armed violence. This wasn’t always the case. In June 2020, Turkish-backed forces tried to overtake the coastal city of Sirte, which separates Tripolitania from a series of five prized oil terminals in Cyrenaica. At the time, Haftar repelled the assault with the assistance of Russian forces.

Now, the Haftar-aligned Prime Minister Bashagha and part of his cabinet are based in that same Libyan National Army-controlled municipality. I met Bashagha on a visit to Libya earlier this winter. Sitting in his brand-new office, next to Sirte’s grandiose Ouagadougou Conference Hall, he appeared serene, as though confident Dabaiba’s tenure would not be allowed to outlast his own. “My government was born out of a Libyan-Libyan process within Parliament, but some foreign states haven’t accepted letting us govern from the capital,” he said, in an indirect jab at Turkey.

As of now, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan faces general elections in mid-May. The high-stakes contest makes it difficult for Erdogan’s government to engage in any protracted warfighting in Libya this year. He’d rather portray his permanent expedition across the Mediterranean solely as a source of economic rewards — an outcome that has not yet materialized.

To be sure, since 2020, Turkey has won some electricity-plant and other construction contracts, mainly confined to the greater Tripoli area. But it is determined to go further and clinch billions’ worth of business across all three provinces. In Libyan waters, Turkey’s state-owned oil company has been seeking permission to explore for undersea gas reserves off of the eastern city of Derna, without any success to date. Unless it acquires access to the easternmost stretch of the Libyan littoral, Turkey cannot exploit the southern parts of the maritime Exclusive Economic Zone that it has endeavored to impose at Greece’s expense.

On land, other Turkish energy companies are eager to become involved in major oil facilities, including in southern Cyrenaica. Another coveted market is Benghazi’s reconstruction, which has already begun in earnest. To fulfill these goals, Ankara needs to improve its relations with the Haftar family and its allies.

On the ground, several clues indicate Turkey’s lack of appetite for any new fighting. The village of Buerat al Hsun, west of Sirte, is now demilitarized, and no Turkish-backed force has conducted military exercises anywhere near the demarcation line in a long time.

That is one reason why Bashagha seemed less angry at Turkey than his Greek or Egyptian colleagues as he shrugged off the maritime memorandum of understanding that Ankara signed with the Dabaiba government in October. Even before a Libyan Appeals Court suspended its implementation earlier this year, Dabaiba’s main opponents understood that, for practical reasons, Ankara wouldn’t move forward without their consent.

The most vocal of those Dabaiba opponents is arguably the Egyptian-backed Speaker of the House of Representatives, Aqila Saleh. His proposed constitutional case for general elections by year-end ignores the U.N.’s preferred framework, and thus could lead to an impasse.

When queried about Turkish interference, the shrewd former judge betrayed no animosity towards Ankara, preferring to lambast his Libyan nemesis, whose departure from office he demands as a precondition to any vote. “I came away from my [August 2] encounter with President Erdogan in Ankara convinced that his immediate entourage just doesn’t let him in on how minuscule the territory controlled by Dabaiba is,” Saleh told me at his compound, 30 miles west of Derna. “If Turkey truly cares about doing business in our region, then we, the eastern authorities, not Tripoli, should be its guarantors.”

The United States Has Worked With Both Sides in Libya

Cyrenaica isn’t the only province where the Tripoli government’s influence is thin. Most of the country’s southwest, called the Fezzan, is beyond its reach, too. For that reason, Washington — which has worked closely with Dabaiba on setting up a new U.S. embassy in Tripoli and transferring a Lockerbie attack suspect — nonetheless cooperated with his rivals to combat extremist groups in the Libyan Sahara.

“Our joint work with the Americans has contributed to weakening the Islamic State in Libya,” said Salem al Zedma, Bashagha’s Deputy Prime Minister in charge of the Fezzan, in a late-evening interview in Sirte. “We are, unquestionably, counterterrorism partners of the United States.” From a village just to the east of Sirte, Zedma belongs to the Awlad Suleiman, an important Arab tribe of the Fezzan. His younger brother Hassan leads the 128th, a sprawling mega-brigade that became part of the Libyan National Army in 2016. With both al-Qaeda and the Islamic State thriving in nearby countries such as Mali and Burkina Faso, Washington will continue to need security cooperation with forces like Hassan’s — and its leverage over them will diminish as a result.

The same goes for a special-forces unit unofficially spearheaded by Saddam Haftar called the Tareq bin Ziyad Brigade, with whom the United States has coordinated on counterterrorism. Throughout my recent visit in Cyrenaica, from the tarmac of Benina Airport to various key locales in and outside Benghazi, the brigade’s red-bereted men were ubiquitous reminders of Saddam’s growing importance.

Saddam’s policies have been somewhat distinct from — but so far always within — those of the larger power structure built by his father over the years. The 36-year-old colonel’s bold ambitions help explain Dabaiba and Ankara’s enduring attempts to cultivate him.

Disjointed Public Debt

If the map of geographic control in Libya is largely static, the institutional and economic realms aren’t. Increasingly, both sides of the Libyan divide are able to fund themselves by tapping into the nation’s public finance system through different channels. This disincentivizes current rulers from taking steps toward reunification or accepting the risk of change that would come with any genuine electoral contest.

One definite advantage that the Tripoli government still has over Haftar and his allies is its political closeness to Libya’s Central Bank, which controls access to public coffers and formal foreign exchange. But on my visit to Sirte, I saw nascent rehabilitation work underway in parts of the scarred city.

This prompted me to ask Bashagha how he managed to raise funds without the official approval of Sadiq al Kabir, the all-powerful governor of the Central Bank. Bashagha indicated that his administration had begun borrowing from commercial banks in Cyrenaica, receiving a first installment of 1.5 billion dinars ($300 million) in the fourth quarter of 2022. “There is lots of money deposited in those balance sheets,” he added. In the first quarter of 2023, the Bashagha government borrowed an additional 2.8 billion dinars ($560 million), part of which has gone to the Committee for the Reconstruction of Benghazi.

Although Tripoli formally oversees Libya’s entire banking system, the latter has, in practice, been split for nearly a decade between east and west. In 2014-2020, the long-standing fracture enabled the eastern authorities to borrow 71.4 billion dinars (then equivalent to $53 billion) without consulting Tripoli. So long as public finances remain bifurcated, this will continue to exacerbate the country’s divisions.

To make matters worse, last November saw the dismissal of Ali al Hibri, a veteran functionary and economist who had been running the Central Bank’s eastern branch for eight years. Hibri had been sympathetic to Haftar, and often willing to act in defiance of Kabir.

Despite that track record, Saleh’s House of Representatives — eager for even greater regional autonomy and more rapid mobilization of reconstruction funds —  replaced Hibri with an eastern-Libyan banker close to Saddam Haftar. The maneuver backfired: two board members resigned in protest, thereby further strengthening the governor in Tripoli. Still, the Central Bank’s eastern branch may potentially raise several billion for the Libyan National Army through the sale of new bonds to commercial banks in Cyrenaica. This borrowed money would come on top of state funds that the Central Bank in Tripoli has funneled to Haftar’s armed coalition, according to two eastern-Libyan businessmen with inside knowledge.

Perhaps unsurprisingly in view of the enormous discretionary authority that Central Bank governor Kabir has wielded since 2011, Saleh says he intends on replacing him, “but the international community keeps blocking any change” — an allusion to the United States, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and other countries. “When households go hungry because of delays in salary payments and because of runaway inflation, are you going to speak to them about democracy? Or do you work on replacing the heads of all sovereign institutions?”

No Equilibrium Below the Calm

In recent remarks, White House Coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa Brett McGurk praised the “strengthening relations between Turkey and the United Arab Emirates.” In Libya, this rapprochement may be preferable to the strife that preceded it — but it is not conducive to Washington’s proclaimed objectives. Both Ankara and Abu Dhabi indulge Moscow. Both foster parochial quid pro quos between Libyan incumbents — and, in so doing, help the latter deepen their entrenchment in power.

The United Arab Emirates, previously the most aggressive booster of the Libyan National Army, has shown a keen interest in accommodating Dabaiba. It sees his transactional style of governance as an opportunity to build influence in Tripoli without abandoning Haftar.

In July, Emirati mediation between Saddam Haftar and Ibrahim Dabaiba brought about the installation of a new National Oil Corporation chairman, whose financial decisions are already being scrutinized by several Libyan watchdogs. Doubling down on the same Dabaiba-Haftar channel, the Emiratis hope to bring about more economic bargains and security arrangements.

To preempt critiques, Dabaiba once promised to stay away from “shady deals that are worked out here and there behind the scenes” but his reassurance was unconvincing. By encouraging secretive conversations between current Libyan powerbrokers, the Emirates and Turkey aren’t delivering any political reconciliation or stabilizing settlement. They are only sapping what remains of Libya’s formal state institutions and undermining the U.N.’s efforts to facilitate authentic elections.

In sum, almost every member of Libya’s present-day ruling class leans on foreign support and resists any fundamental change. Each is busy tweaking the current deadlock to their own benefit while hoping that the shift won’t be so transformative that their existing privileges might be diminished. Meanwhile, in the country’s west, unresolved enmity between Tripoli militias may still erupt in ways that Turkey’s combat drones cannot suppress.

Left to their own devices, neither Turkey, Egypt, nor the United Arab Emirates will tolerate any substantive departure from the current status quo. If constructive change in Libya is an actual priority for Washington, it should be prepared to spend political capital to jolt its regional friends out of their dogged inertia.

***

Jalel Harchaoui is an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, London. His work focuses on the security and political economy of North Africa, with an emphasis on Libya.

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Jason Pack & Stefano Marcuzzi

Part 1) Setting the Stage for a Story of Banking Dysfunction: The Inscrutability and Semi-sovereignty of Libya’s Banking Sector

This section seeks to provide a brief summary, drawing on previous work,1 of how the conditions of the Global Enduring Disorder and the post-Gadhafi transition facilitated the CBL becoming Libya’s most powerful semi-sovereign institution and why it is a “black box” beyond governmental scrutiny/ regulation. The Gadhafi regime was toppled as the Global Enduring Disorder came into full swing.

This had various implications:

1) Allied countries’ policies towards post-Gadhafi Libya were poorly coordinated — France and Italy taking opposite sides in the post-2014 Wars for Post-Gadhafi Succession is a case in point;

2) non-transparent financial transactions and misinformation flowed seamlessly in and out of Libya;

3) rival actors that nonetheless could have cultivated certain shared interests in Libya — such as Turkey/Egypt, Russia/the U.S., Qatar/the UAE — chose to extend their global struggles into the new post-conflict vacuum rather than coordinating on shared interests;

4) another less known dynamic is the extent to which post-Gadhafian Libyan leaders as well as international actors prioritized political state-building over economic reform, misunderstanding Libya’s conflict economy as a symptom of its state-implosion rather than one of its driving factors.

The Libyan economy remains the most poorly understood aspect of the country and its ongoing civil war. It is also highly dissimilar to other Middle Eastern oil states.

Gadhafian economic structures, similar to those of the Soviet Union or Omar al-Bashir’s Sudan, were not “inefficient” when judged against their actual goals.

They were not created to produce profit and avoid loss. They were constructed to maintain political control, avoid scrutiny, facilitate the flow of corrupt money into and out of the international financial system, and convert their counterparties into advocates for the status quo — tasks in which they performed admirably.

These perverse structures were bequeathed en masse to the post-Gadhafian state without meaningful reform. Only global collective action to adjudicate competing claimants could ever have succeeded in improving the situation, yet the Enduring Disorder inhibits that form of coherent collective action from getting started.

As a result, Libya remains trapped with its Gadhafian legacy institutions and the ensuing proxy conflict, because major corporations, governments, and international institutions lack the coordination mechanisms to work with pioneering Libyan reformers to devise and implement something better.

During the 2011 Uprisings, no consensus existed among either the fighters or the political leaders as to the economic system that should be implemented post-Gadhafi.

It should therefore come as no surprise that when Tripoli fell in August of that year and the Temporary Constitutional Declaration was issued earlier that same month, it did not directly address Libya’s economic institutions.

Similarly, the topic was not extensively discussed or legislated by post-Gadhafi Libya’s first authority, the unelected National Transitional Council (NTC), or by its first elected body, the General National Congress (GNC).

This behavior was justified at the time by the fact that first the NTC, then the GNC, and later the elected HoR and U.N.-appointed Government of National Accord (GNA) understood themselves as transitional governance authorities and lacked either unfettered sovereignty or domestic legitimacy.

Amidst this vacuum of legitimacy, they wished to remain in the good graces of the populace who had shed blood allowing them to come to power.

Therefore, the new authorities resorted to appeasement: putting militias on the government payroll, more than doubling state salaries, increasing subsidies on consumer goods, and creating new semi-independent institutions, such as the Warriors Affairs Commission, to dispense billions of dollars in an attempt to purchase the loyalty of the most potentially disruptive segments of the population.

These payments were routed through the Central Bank and required many Libyan men to be added to its payrolls. Hence, for many Libyans after the fall of Gadhafi, the Libyan social contract entails the state providing their economic livelihood in exchange for political quiescence via an indirect rentier model.

Given that vision of a social contract, pre-existing economic institutions — such as the CBL, the General Electric Company of Libya (GECOL), and the National Oil Company (NOC) — whose ostensible roles were to help the Libyan populace by wiring money, generating electricity, or producing oil, had a greater degree of legitimacy than the new political bodies, which were not overseen by a constitution and whose electoral legitimacy or governance mandate was frequently challenged.

As a result of the political vacuum, the alphabet soup of Libya’s economic institutions saw their degrees of sovereignty and independence increase over the course of the post-Gadhafi period. Libya’s political class has neither the authority nor the competence to police, or sometimes even understand, their activities.

In effect, these institutions have had no genuine domestic oversight and no effective way for government to control or even monitor their actions, or replace their leaderships. This is a situation in which Libya’s Central Bank is its most powerful institution, able to hold and move money in whatever ways it sees fit.

It is illegal to wire dinars outside of Libya and forbidden to pay employees inside Libya in non-dinar currencies. Internally, salaries cannot be paid and government budgets doled out except through Central Bank lump-sum transfers. All money that flows through the Libyan economy passes through the Central Bank.

This raises the interlocked questions:

• Who regulates and supervises the CBL?
• What governmental entities define its policy objectives?
• Who sees that its technical competencies improve or that it adopts international best practices or that it polices suspect transactions?

The CBL’s extensive legal mandate grants it a de facto monopoly over foreign exchange.

As such, money cannot flow in and out of Libya without passing through the Central Bank.

This point was vividly illustrated by a Libyan legal expert we spoke with: “There is no unified procedure for repatriating profits from Libya from joint venture companies or branch offices of foreign firms. Contracts and payments, yes … but there is total opacity about how to handle things like moving your local company’s profits out of Libya, so the only way to do it is through cultivating a close relationship with the management of the Central Bank.”

The bank’s wide remit and perception of vast discretionary powers is part of the reason it is fought over so extensively. Clearly, future reforms to the bank’s mandate and discretionary powers could help alleviate some of the drivers of the narrative and physical wars over the bank.

The CBL is thought of by many interviewed for this report as an omnipotent black box, Libya’s most powerful, yet most opaque institution. Paradoxically, international law has combined with the prevailing conditions of the Enduring Disorder to further this situation and this perception.

The semi-sovereignty of Libya’s institutions was not much affected by the 2014-15 First War for Post-Gadhafi Succession. In fact, international community actions ring-fenced Libya’s institutions, particularly the Central Bank and NOC, from the fighting, further increasing their semi-sovereignty even though the leaderships of those institutions were contested as Libya’s governance bifurcated into rival eastern and western claimants (associated with the HoR and the GNC/GNA, respectively).

The Dec. 17, 2015 Skhirat Agreement refers to the CBL as a sovereign institution. The central banks of other countries are not traditionally thought of as possessing sovereignty even if they are legally independent. This conception might be because the CBL owns the vast majority of the banking sector and as such its influence over finance and banking in Libya is potentially greater than that of any other central bank.

Annex 5 of the treaty reads, “Libya’s sovereign institutions play an essential role in upholding the long-term interests of the Libyan people. The Government of National Accord will safeguard the Central Bank of Libya … and other independent institutions and will ensure that these institutions are permitted to fulfil their recognized role of safeguarding Libya’s resources for the benefit of all Libyans.”

Rather than appointing the government to supervise the bank, the treaty calls upon the government to protect it from political oversight or interference. The bank’s “recognized role” is not further spelled out in the document; therefore, the agreement appears to simply enshrine Gadhafian legal precedents about various economic institutions as permanent and immutable for both the international community and Libya.

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Jason Pack is a former non-resident scholar at MEI, author of Libya and the Global Enduring Disorder, and the president of LibyaAnalysis LLC. He is the Director of the NATO & THE GLOBAL ENDURING DISORDER Project and a Senior Analyst for Emerging Challenges at the NATO Defense College Foundation.

Stefano Marcuzzi is a Research Fellow at the Center for Higher Defense Studies (CASD), Rome, a Senior Analyst at Libya Analysis LLC, an Adjunct Fellow at University College Dublin (UCD) and Boston University (BU), and an Emerging Challenges Analyst at the NATO Defense College Foundation (NDFC), Rome. He is the author of The EU, NATO and the Libya Conflict. Anatomy of a Failure.

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Jason Pack & Stefano Marcuzzi

Summary:

We no longer inhabit the post-Cold War era. There is no global hegemon unifying its allies to adopt consensus positions on issues of shared interest like climate change, tax havens, or the reconstruction of post-conflict states.

This era of Global Enduring Disorder makes it particularly difficult for wealthy, geostrategically important post-conflict states to transition to stable governance as myriad external and internal conflict actors pull them in a range of directions, making real reform or peacebuilding nearly impossible.

This leads to a situation where post-conflict states (such as the post-Arab Spring states) have inherited their dysfunctional economic institutions from the prior regimes without meaningful hegemonic supervision.

Furthermore, a core feature of this new era is the rapid spread of media narratives stigmatizing various institutions or elites for participation in “conspiratorial” activities. Conspiracy theories and wars to control the narrative are not new. However, the ability of non-experts to spread their opinions and the sheer amounts of misinformation constitute a quantitively and qualitatively new phenomenon.

All of these core dynamics are at play in Libya’s post-Gadhafi transition. In fact, it may be the first theater in which all of the relevant dynamics of the Enduring Disorder initially came together.

In this paper, we investigate the ongoing Libya conflict through the Enduring Disorder paradigm focusing on the financial and banking sectors, honing in on stakeholder perceptions of the Central Bank of Libya (CBL), its transparency/opacity, and the “narrative wars” over who is to blame for, and who benefits from, Libya’s economic dysfunction, the lack of an annual budget, and the current lack of a quorum on the CBL board.

This paper concludes with policy recommendations. The international community shouldn’t get lost in debates around elections and new interim governments.

Fixing the CBL’s irregular board structure and bifurcation is crucial to solving the narrative war around Libya’s finances, yet it is not possible without intermediate steps towards reform.

On Feb. 5, 2023, the regional spokesman for the U.S. Department of State, Samuel Warburg, said that the U.S.’s current priority in Libya is to “achieve Libyan aspirations to have a transparent management of oil revenues.”

As such, we advocate for the U.S. to lead international efforts pushing for transparency and international best practices to be brought to Libya’s finances.

The Enduring Disorder is here to stay. Misinformation, disinformation, and narrative wars prevail on most complex and divisive issues of our day. Policymakers need to take this into account as they devise new interventions to mitigate the disorder and isolate sensitive and essential institutions, like the CBL, from larger conflict dynamics, by promoting transparency and best practices.

Key Points:

• The CBL is at the center of a range of outlandish conspiracy theories about the underlying causes of Libya’s ongoing conflict. We found that the bank has used the misinformation against it as an excuse to not initiate genuine reforms, but rather to undertake “window dressing” measures to allay critics.

• Most Western policymakers we spoke to cited the reunification of the CBL as a paramount concern, yet among businesspeople the security situation and the lack of trusted contacts, not the lack of structural reforms or reunification, remains the main impediment to doing business in Libya.

• We propose quick wins to disentangle technical matters from media optics, while better informing Libyans and Libyawatchers about the actual state of Libya’s finances, hence blunting the potential impact of misinformation. We counsel a “follow the money” approach: Western officials should not get lost in the media debates concerning the constitutional basis for elections. In reality, the root causes of most status quo attempts to block political progress are financial opacity and corruption.

• The Biden administration has recently taken steps indicating that it will continue its efforts to bring transparency and accountability to Libya’s finances, while simultaneously confining itself to the margins of the Libyan elections debate — allowing the U.N. to call the shots on that file. We applaud this approach and advocate for American policymakers to use carrots and serious sticks in their push for transparency and accountability in Libya’s banking sector.

Introduction:

Narrative Wars, Misinformation, and the Battle over the Libyan Banking Sector

The banking sector is crucial to Libya’s conflict economy and how the CBL’s core operational procedures facilitate the continuation of the ongoing low-grade civil war and incentivize many parties to maintain the status quo.

The CBL is also essential to doing business in Libya and making sure Libyans have basic services from electricity to infrastructure to food imports to drinking water. Simply put, the Central Bank conducts its legally mandated functions in the economy. It may also do a lot more than that.

The CBL implicitly continues the Gadhafian indirect rentier tradition of funding all sides of Libya’s conflict economy and underwriting the subsidy system on which it is based.

It is also the key portal through which most foreign businesses interact with Libya, even if they are not in banking. Foreign actors like Turkey, Russia, the Gulf states, the U.S., and the European Union (EU) have core equities in how the Libyan banking sector operates.

Companies within those countries are also all owed money by various Libyan entities and their hopes of recovering those debts or backpayments depend on CBL actions.

At the same time, the CBL is also at the center of a range of outlandish conspiracy theories about the underlying causes of Libya’s conflicts.

Various conflict actors wish to blame most injustices on CBL policy and Governor Kabir, in a similar way that QAnon supporters wish to blame a cosmopolitan elite and Hillary Clinton for all that is wrong in America and the world.

These are both disinformation campaigns built upon deliberate misinformation and conspiratorial thinking. This is not to say that a cosmopolitan elite in America is not indirectly benefiting from certain advantages of neoliberal economic policies or that CBL policy does not implicitly favor certain Libyan social segments over others.

All successful conspiracies are built around a tiny grain of truth. But on the whole, conspiracy theories painting the CBL as the puppet masters and ultimate beneficiaries of Libya’s conflict economy are an exaggeration and vast oversimplification.

The CBL largely carries out its legal mandate and functions with the woefully poor transparency standards common among Libyan institutions.

It may also go beyond its legal remit, but it is impossible for even the most knowledgeable outsiders to determine this. At present, the CBL board lacks a legal quorum due to resignations and backroom deals.

This unsustainable situation is likely to persist for some time as new board members can only be appointed as part of a broad consensus between the House of Representatives (HoR) and the High State Council (HSC).

Achieving such a consensus would be as easy, or as difficult, as agreeing upon electoral procedures or a constitution for Libya.

As a result, the disorder is likely to endure and deepen. None of the Libyan and Western stakeholders we talked to could point to any conclusive evidence that the CBL is directly involved in corruption.

Many pointed to incidents when CBL statements and actions indicated an overstepping of its mandate or the expressing of political partisanship. Yet for the businesspeople and policymakers we spoke to, that remains a far cry from financial malfeasance of the sort that “is frequently alleged and rarely if ever demonstrated.”

The academic, journalistic, and think tank community we spoke to demonstrated an interest in the particularly damning AB report of 2016 and the 2021 Global Witness report “Discredited,” which allege corruption in letters of credit allocations, but we found these reports had very limited cut through with businesspeople and policymakers as their “allegations” were simply understood as being part of a larger narrative war and not viewed as conclusive in any way.

These differences in perception are a critical part of the ongoing narrative war and they allow for a false equivalency that enables eastern Libyan attempts to “penetrate” the banking sector via coerced personnel resignations and backroom deals.

In November 2022, HoR Chairman Aguila Saleh and Khalifa Hifter’s inner circle sacked Ali al-Hibri, the deputy CBL governor and parallel eastern CBL head, for not releasing a budget to the HoR, coerced resignations from eastern CBL board members, and sought to siphon funds from eastern commercial banks.

These are real-world outcomes of the narrative war.

At present, without a functioning board the CBL cannot legally undertake its core function of providing liquidity to the economy, yet it is continuing to do just that. Therefore, its governor finds himself hamstrung by a conspiracy hatched against him. Just as happened on Jan. 6, 2021 in the U.S., when Congress and the Electoral College were lampooned in social media and misinformation reigns supreme, it becomes far easier for opponents to ignore laws and manipulate norms to attack it.

Despite the CBL largely being on the defensive in the narrative war, we have found that the bank has used the misinformation against it as an excuse to not initiate genuine reforms or major transparency initiatives, but rather to undertake “window dressing” measures to allay critics.

These “media reforms” help the CBL and its allies counter the narrative war against it, while not fundamentally changing matters. Had the CBL established more regular board meetings and governance practices it might not now find itself in the current situation.

In this, the CBL is no different from other Libyan actors and institutions that, when attacked for corruption or blocking elections, simply try to “play ball” with reforms or elections while fundamentally doing very little to change actual dynamics.

As a result many Libyan institutions and key decision makers find themselves hamstrung by spoilers.

The dynamics of the Enduring Disorder make genuine reforms nearly impossible until the narrative war is disentangled from the actual technical, legal, and political challenges.

Given how narratives of reforms have frequently obscured the lack of implementation of actual solutions, we conclude the paper by proposing a series of genuine reforms that are calculated with the complexities of our era in mind.

They serve to fight misinformation, promote transparency, and defend technocracy, so as to remove Libya’s financial and banking sector from the maelstrom of conflict that has engulfed the country and the international system.

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Jason Pack is a former non-resident scholar at MEI, author of Libya and the Global Enduring Disorder, and the president of LibyaAnalysis LLC. He is the Director of the NATO & THE GLOBAL ENDURING DISORDER Project and a Senior Analyst for Emerging Challenges at the NATO Defense College Foundation.

Stefano Marcuzzi is a Research Fellow at the Center for Higher Defense Studies (CASD), Rome, a Senior Analyst at Libya Analysis LLC, an Adjunct Fellow at University College Dublin (UCD) and Boston University (BU), and an Emerging Challenges Analyst at the NATO Defense College Foundation (NDFC), Rome. He is the author of The EU, NATO and the Libya Conflict. Anatomy of a Failure.

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Hasan Dhaimish – known as ‘The Cleaver‘ – was famous for satirical cartoons depicting Muammar Gaddafi, but he also had a passion for jazz

The Libyan city of Benghazi is perhaps the unlikeliest place to discover Motown’s classic soul and funk music.

Yet it was there in the north African city as the dust was still settling from the September 1969 coup d’état – spearheaded by Muammar Gaddafi – where the late Libyan artist Hasan Dhaimish first discovered his life-long infatuation for music.

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The then 14-year-old was on the rooftop of his home when he first tuned into his shortwave radio and the soulful music of Smokey Robinson and Marvin Gaye came floating out of his speakers.

It was in a language he did not understand at the time, but the influence of Motown, the record company that propelled African-American musicians into the US global spotlight against the backdrop of the civil rights movement, was undoubtedly universal. 

Hasan became known for building friendships through a mutual love of music, where he would create mixed tapes for friends, personalising cassette covers with cartoon sketches he became synonymous with in his work as an artist.

Renowned in Libya for his acerbic cartoons depicting morose politicians as animal caricatures, Hasan’s satirical cartoons, or Alsatoor (The Cleaver) as he was known, became the voice of the Libyan opposition rallying against Gaddafi’s government. 

Gaddaffi himself was typically depicted as the formidable dictator who was reduced to comical cartoons wearing Mickey Mouse ears, pointed high-heels, and sometimes he was portrayed as a writhing snake. 

Inspiration for art

To those familiar only with his work as his alter-ego, his art – which was simple, witty, yet incisive in its political commentary – was driven by a love for Libya and buttressed by a resolute anger towards the dictatorship that was crippling its socio-economic and political infrastructure.

Another creative well, however, from which Hasan drew inspiration for his art was from his insatiable love for music. Dressed in flared trousers, waistcoats and sporting an afro, like a moth to a musical flame he found himself drawn to Glastonbury and reggae festivals across the UK. But it was the vivacious and soulful cadences of jazz, blues, and soul in particular, which he discovered in the 1990s, that came alive in his artwork in a series of paintings.

At the centre of a new exhibition organised by his son Sherif called “Breezin,” which was held at the Pendle Heritage Centre in Lancashire from 23 March to 2 April, Hasan’s jazz and blues-inspired art pays homage to musical titans such as Billie Holiday. 

Hasan’s son Sherif grew up observing his father and the ways in which he drew inspiration as a cartoonist from seemingly unremarkable moments.

“My dad was very unorthodox. He was constantly drawing in situations where people don’t usually draw. When we were having breakfast in a hotel in Doha once, without me even realising, he had drawn a cartoon of every single person sitting around me. Whenever he was on the phone, even if it was the bank, he’d throw a piece of paper at you where he’d drawn you while you were sitting watching TV,” he said.

The son of the respected Sheikh Dhaimish, who was the adviser to King Idris, Libya’s monarch from 1951 to 1969, Hasan watched his father sketch pigeons directly on the tiles of their home.

Catharsis

It wasn’t until Hasan was a teenager and his older sister was getting married that he began drawing.

What began as a form of catharsis, dealing with the departure of his sister from the family home, eventually turned into a form of political resistance against Gaddafi and his associates.

Like many young Libyan men at the time, a then 19-year-old Hasan left Benghazi in 1975 to avoid mandatory conscription in an Air Force loyal to Gaddafi. However, he also hoped that one day he would return once Gaddafi was removed.

In 1977, he settled in a post-industrial town in the north, called Burnley, in Lancashire, England, as an asylum-seeker.

In 1979, he married his wife Karen Waddington. After waitressing at restaurants over the years and eventually securing permanent residency, he went on to study his A-levels and undergraduate degree in Art and Design at the University of Bradford, eventually becoming a graphics and photography teacher at Nelson and Colne College.

As the title of the exhibition suggests, his style “breezed” from cartoons, paint splatters, and pentimenti, a technique where paintings are painted one on top of another.

The “Funky 16 Corners” painting is one such example where Hasan used this technique. Almost three years in the making, Sherif said his father was rarely sentimental over his paintings, but this particular painting would undoubtedly have been the one he would have refused to part with. 

Jazz and blues

Hasan’s paintings burst with colour and the Herculean personalities of jazz singers such as Sarah Vaughan and Robert Johnson, whose musical expressions are defined and frozen with subtle strokes of black.

One portrait depicts a radiant, young Billie Holiday against a backdrop of flowers exploding with warmth and ochre shades, a warmth Sherif says is a manifestation of his father’s own personality.

“My dad lived a pretty chaotic, free-spirited life. He did things on his own terms and he was a colourful soul. He loved to express himself, and I think he managed to do that on the canvas,” he said.

As a student at Bradford, he was exposed to other fellow artists and music enthusiasts. His belated entry into higher education became an unlikely doorway into the music of the legendary trumpet player Miles Davis in particular, whose album Doo-Bop became the focal point of his paintings. This musical journey led him down a time-warp in which he began to look at the history of blues.

For Hasan, jazz and blues music was more than something that sounded pleasing to the ear, according to Sherif.

“He connected with it not just on a musical level, but the narratives that were behind blues and jazz music. With the blues, it’s very sombre music that comes from the soul, and I think he appreciated that. He connected with that feeling of being an anomaly around here (Burnley) especially. It was a form of escapism for him.”

Strong influences

For Hasan, who was himself a man exiled from his homeland, the narrative of struggle, of loss, and overcoming adversity resonated deeply. It was intrinsic to blues music, a genre born from slaves who toiled in the southern plantations of America, where singing away one’s troubles came floating out of their lungs as a form of catharsis but also a form of resistance. 

Sherif said Hasan took influences even from the clothing of the musicians he followed so ardently.

“Dad loved the clothes that they wore too. He himself mimicked it later in life when he wore a lot of shirts, waistcoats and [newsboy] caps. In the 70s and 80s, he had an Afro. He was very hip, very cool, he had a great dress sense.”

Flitting between dualities is how Hasan spent most of his life, alternating from his role as a teacher, encouraging individuality and creativity within his students, to the life of a political dissident masquerading under the pseudonym Alsatoor.

In 1979 in London, outside Earls Court tube station, he spotted a Libyan opposition magazine on a newsstand. He had gone there to attend a demonstration against the Libyan government.

The birth of Alsatoor

Upon returning home, he contacted the magazine and started publishing satirical cartoons for them, thus beginning his career as one of Libya’s most prolific political cartoonists where he went on to create his own magazine after his moniker Alsatoor.

Sitting in front of the television in the evenings, while consuming Arabic-speaking Libyan news, is when Dhaimish would create the searing, unapologetic cartoon sketches that would cause seismic ripples in Libya to the delight of its people but to the ire of the Libyan government.

Though he was fearless, Hasan’s work was not without risk. Hasan was never attacked, but the shadow of Gaddafi loomed as far as the UK where his informants were said to be hiding, and where his death squads assassinated those in opposition to him.

Amnesty International reported dozens of such assassinations of Libyan dissidents outside Libya in the 1980s.

It wasn’t until the advent of social media that his work became popularised. Hasan never officially disclosed his identity of Alsatoor, but followers of his work inevitably began to draw the link after the Libyan revolution in 2011, as he posted the cartoons he sketched on his Facebook page which has over 40,000 followers.

After the Arab revolutions

As much as Hasan thrived on sketching his cartoons, his life as a cartoonist eventually became somewhat of a burden.

He secured a job as a cartoonist with a Libyan news channel in Doha and also 216 TV in Jordan, following the Arab revolutions in 2011.

Sherif said his father felt trapped and creatively sapped in the torrid Middle Eastern heat and sanitised surroundings of hotel rooms in Doha and Amman.

“In the last five years of his life, the satire work took up a lot of his time. In Doha he felt he didn’t have the inspiration to paint. It was a place that lacked soul. Even as rainy and as miserable as it can be here in Burnley, it was home for him. He found painting and walking in this kind of weather very inspiring.

“After the revolution, there were so many times where it was two steps forward, ten steps back with Libya. He just wanted to go back to Benghazi, put his feet in the water, and say, ‘I can see it’s a mess here, but I’m back now, I’ve done it and now I can just carry on with my life.’ He was constantly clawing towards going back, but unfortunately it never materialised. He was never able to go back because it was too dangerous. There were too many assassinations.”

Hasan passed away in 2016 at the age of 60. 

Although many of Hasan’s students and friends were unable to say goodbye to him because of his itinerant life travelling between Burnley, Doha and Amman, for Sherif, the exhibition isn’t simply a “curtain closing” ceremony on his father’s work.

“I wanted to show people who only knew of his satire work what other work he did and where it was rooted. In the last few years of his life, he left the UK and his family behind for the Middle East because he felt it was his duty to do that. His satire wasn’t just sticking donkey’s tails on politicians who were buffoons.”

Sherif explains that his father left a mark on his followers, especially young Libyans.

“Talk to any of his former students, and they’ll tell you what a true teacher he was. He passed on wisdom and he shared ideas with young teenagers who had an interest in art. He tried to open people’s minds, and I think he was successful in doing that.”

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