Laurent of Saint Perier
By announcing that he was resigning from his position as United Nations special envoy to Libya – like all his predecessors before him – former Senegalese minister Abdoulaye Bathily denounced the political leaders who, since 2011, have been obstructing any attempt to end the crisis. Who are these five leaders?
“We cannot allow the aspirations of the 2.8 million registered Libyan voters to be overshadowed by the narrow interests of a few,” lamented Abdoulaye Bathily , explaining to the United Nations Security Council on April 16, 2024, why he was resigning after a year and a half as special envoy to Libya . And he bluntly revealed the identities of the five people concerned: Mohamed Takala, President of the High Council of State; Abdelhamid Dbeibah , Prime Minister of the Government of National Unity; Aguila Saleh , Speaker of the House of Representatives; General Khalifa Haftar , Commander of the Libyan National Army; and Mohammed el-Menfi , President of the Presidential Council.
“Bathily was mainly trying to clear himself of having failed in his objective of compromising the status quo so that elections could be held,” said Jalel Harchaoui, a Libya specialist at the Royal United Services Institute in London. “Even in Sweden, you would have a hard time finding five people who could reach a consensus on such a subject. In Libya, it was utopian; no one is prepared to implement a change that would mean their own change of position.”
Abdoulaye Bathily’s predecessor, Ghassan Salamé , had drawn the pragmatic conclusion that with the ceasefire holding and the economy restarting, the status quo was the least bad solution. “If the elections lead Libyans to divide again, we don’t need them,” he told Jeune Afrique in December 2023.
The partition of the country between the lords of the crisis, from the warlike split that it was in 2014 to the failure of Haftar’s attack on Tripoli in 2019-2020, has thus become a knowing division of the Libyan cheese. Well established, the figures who hold the country today could dictate its destiny according to their bargaining for a long time to come.
While the three names of Haftar, Saleh and Dbeibah regularly appear in the international press, those of el-Menfi and Takala rarely appear. Who are these “five main Libyan stakeholders” who have aroused the bitterness of the Senegalese historian? What is their real power, or power to cause harm?
Mohammed el-Menfi
“If I had to choose five decisive parties in the Libyan conflict, I would have cited Seif el-Islam Gaddafi rather than Menfi. But Bathily had set himself the goal of bringing together these five and, having never succeeded, it is them that he denounces, including the insipid Menfi,” immediately responds Virginie Collombier, professor at the Roman University Luis Guido Carli and founder of the think tank Libya Initiative in 2015. However, as president of the Presidential Council, which theoretically holds executive power, Menfi embodies the Libyan head of state in the eyes of the international community .
Born in 1976, he is the youngest of the quintet and, although originally from Tobruk in the east, he has always been loyal to the Tripoli authorities. His joint election with that of Dbeibah as prime minister, by 74 Libyan representatives meeting in 2021 in Geneva under the auspices of the UN, was a sign of détente between Tripoli, where the Presidential Council is based, and Benghazi, Haftar’s capital in the east.
An engineer by training, ambassador to Athens in 2018, this affable man has made national reconciliation his hobbyhorse. Without much result. “His inoffensive side allowed him to speak with Haftar following the Geneva process and his speech is compatible with Western diplomacy, but he has no military means, unlike Haftar and Dbeibah. He is a bit of a papier-mâché character, a smooth man who understood that if a merged East-West cabinet were to be set up, no one would pressure him to leave his place as representative of the East,” explains Jalel Harchaoui.
Mohamed Takala
Mohammed Takala, 58, was elected president of the High Council of State in August 2023. This 145-member legislative assembly was created in Tripoli in 2016 as an upper house to match the House of Representatives elected in Tripoli in 2014, but installed the same year in Tobruk, in the east, fleeing the resumption of fighting. “Like Menfi, he has an institutional position that places him above the fray, but he does not have control over much,” says Virginie Collombier. A doctor in computer science from the University of Budapest, Mohammed Takala has been involved in politics since the revolution, and was elected deputy in the first post-Gaddafi legislative elections in 2012.
Winner by a few votes against the outgoing president Khaled el-Mechri, he won the post with the help of Prime Minister Abdelhamid Dbeibah, of whom Mechri had become an enemy. “He is a worker,” describes Jalel Harchaoui, “surrounded by a good team and who has presence and intelligence. He does not seek controversy because he mainly wants to be re-elected, but his post is put back into play every twelve to fourteen months. He must therefore use wooden language and he makes statements for better representation of minorities, etc., however, when digging deeper, we quickly realize that for him, certainly the status quo is not viable, but it must not budge.”
Aguila Saleh
In the face of the precedent, Aguila Saleh grips the eastern perch of the House of Representatives much more firmly. Elected as a deputy in 2012, the octogenarian has been presiding over the assembly that has taken refuge in Tobruk since 2014. But the renewal of the latter, scheduled for 2018 then postponed to 2021, ultimately never took place due to the lack of agreement on the electoral law. A paralysis that allows the one on whom the said law largely depends – Saleh himself – to remain in his comfortable seat.
A long career in the Libyan judiciary has equipped him to legally secure his position and the international community has no other solution than to recognize this prolonged interim. Master of the laws and unbeatable kingmaker – except, ultimately, by himself – he does not need a militia to allow himself to, sometimes, stand up to the lord of the East, Khalifa Haftar, his accomplice whom he made marshal in 2016 through the voice of his Parliament.
Favorite in the elections held in Geneva in 2021, where he was a candidate for the presidency of the Council with the then Minister of the Interior, Fathi Bachagha , as a candidate for the prime minister’s office, he was snatched away by five votes (out of 75) by the Menfi-Dbeibah couple, then accused of having bought voters.
Harchaoui explains: “He sets as a condition for holding elections their supervision by a new technical government: a Trojan horse policy to drive out his enemy Dbeibah who is entirely in the interests of the Egyptians hostile to the latter. Because if Takala is the voice of the Turks, the supporters of the West to whom he is close without being a client, Saleh is that of the Egyptians, who support their neighbors to the East. And Cairo, after opening the door to Dbeibah, lost all confidence in him after receiving many promises of magnificent contracts, always without follow-up.”
Abdelhamid Dbeibah
His term ended on December 25, 2021, but he clings to his position as firmly as his rival Saleh, putting forward the argument that “the government will continue to exercise its functions until the elections,” which no one wants and which everyone is obstructing. Thus Saleh makes the organization of the elections conditional on Dbeibah’s departure, while the latter makes his departure dependent on the outcome of the elections. And the impossible resolution of this contradictory equation allows each to remain in their own backyard.
Born in 1959 into a wealthy merchant family in Misrata, Abdelhamid Dbeibah boasted a master’s degree in civil engineering obtained from the University of Toronto in 1992, but the institution declared, after investigation, that it had found no trace of his passage. However, it was in the construction industry that he made his fortune under Gaddafi, leader or partner of large state structures in the sector. Having entered politics stealthily in 2011 and reached the top in a decade, he does not bother with scruples and feeds on all the legal and illicit savings to maintain an army composed of motley mercenary militias.
For Jalel Harchaoui, “he manages to maintain a form of security by managing an unstable coalition of militias, despite sporadic bloody clashes. The Turks, the Italians, the Americans see no replacements and he knows that there is no alternative to himself.” The only major shadow over the magnate’s power and business: his powerful rivals in the East, who relentlessly announce his downfall.
But behind the official farce, the time has come for conviviality and sharing between Marshal Haftar and Prime Minister Dbeibah, as Virginie Collombier recalls: “With the good offices of the Emirates, they agreed in 2022 to change the head of the national oil company [NOC] and place someone close to Haftar there. The ability of these two actors to agree on such a point illustrates this priority given to the status quo.” The agreement made Aguila Saleh shudder, who then sought to get closer to the Turks, yesterday’s enemies but powerful sponsors of Dbeibah.
Khalifa Haftar
With his colorful and sparklingly decorated uniforms, his martial poses and speeches, but also his major military operations that turned into routs, he evokes a lot of the former fallen regime of Colonel Gaddafi, his senior by a year, with whom he had shared everything from the Benghazi Military Academy to the break-up, when Haftar was taken prisoner by the Chadians in 1987.
Exfiltrated to the United States in 1990, he struggled in vain to overthrow Gaddafi until the revolution gave him his chance. A first return, as a fighter in the revolution, was cut short in 2011, when he only stayed a few months on Libyan soil. He returned in 2013 and, having refined his strategy, he managed to unite former army members, combatant groups and tribes from the East and launched his “Libyan National Army” in 2014 to restore order in the face of militia chaos. He failed in Tripoli, but succeeded in Benghazi, where he established his power, purging the armed Islamist groups and his least opponents from the East.
Today master of two-thirds of the country, the army chief marshal controls all areas of activity, from the media to organized crime, including humanitarian work, reconstruction and economic development, having placed his pawns everywhere and the best of them, his sons, on the most strategic squares. Because he is old and had a severe stroke in 2018, but of his sons Saddam, Khaled, Belkacem and Essedik, no one has yet managed to guess who he has chosen to succeed him… or even if he has chosen.
For Virginie Collombier, “the big question now is whether the Haftar clan can remain united and maintain its centrality: can the brothers come to an agreement? There are serious doubts about this, as well as about the ability of national and external actors to accept such a dynastic succession. Thus, Saddam, despite being the army chief of staff, has no military training. Could Gaddafi’s former officers agree to obediently obey his command ?”
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Laurent de Saint-Périer is a journalist specializing in the Maghreb/Middle East, covering Syria, Egypt and Iran in particular. He is also a specialist in Gabon.
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