Laurent of Saint Perier
By getting closer to the regimes in place in the Sahel, like him close to Moscow, the Libyan marshal is playing on several tables. But he is above all seeking to consolidate his power in the face of the Western authorities and to position himself as an essential partner, including for Westerners.
The visit to Ouagadougou on July 9 by Saddam Haftar , the youngest of the six sons of the marshal who reigns over more than half of Libya , did not go unnoticed despite his air of discretion. The putative heir to his father’s domains has already been entrusted with diplomatic missions, just like his other brothers. But he has the upper hand in the military field, because he was promoted on May 15 to chief of staff of the land forces of his father’s self-proclaimed Libyan National Army.
The timing is not insignificant. The visit took place three days after the creation of the Confederation of Sahel States between the militarist regimes that seized power in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. From Benghazi to Bamako, the officers in charge have no shortage of common ground, having seized power from civilian governments deemed to be under the influence and incapable of dealing with the wars that are setting the region ablaze, conflicts fueled by the fall of Gaddafi in late 2011.
Logical security cooperation
Politicians, journalists, activists… Anything that opposes their vision and methods is thrown into the catch-all of “terrorism” with the declared enemies of the military: the jihadists and radical Islamists. These, mobile, organized in networks, know how to play as much with the vast and hostile environment of the Sahel as with the border porosities increased by the political instability of the four States: the establishment of effective security cooperation seems logical, even essential. And Saddam Haftar, all-powerful in his father’s army, was indeed designated to go and conclude it with the AES.
“Haftar’s sons all serve his diplomacy, but Saddam is the top security official and he is in charge of the southern border area where multiple armed groups are trying to get involved. He was in charge of the Sudanese issue and had notably met with Chadian Idriss Déby before his death,” recalls Jalel Harchaoui, a political scientist specializing in Libya.
From Benghazi to Bamako, it is also a Russian diagonal that continues to assert itself faster, higher and stronger against its declared Western enemies: France, whose armies have been expelled from the zone, and the United States, which is in the process of packing its bags. The deep-water port of Tobruk, east of Benghazi, under Haftar’s control, thus becomes the Kremlin’s gateway to its African ambitions and to its Africa Corps, obeying the Ministry of Defense, which has supplanted the paramilitary group Wagner.
Russian Corridor
Easily accessible from the Black Sea, the port of Tobruk is a much more convenient hub than the landlocked Central African Republic, the first Russian target hit in 2018. Moscow has long been suspected of seeking to open a naval base in Tobruk as it did in Syria, in Tartus, and is now behaving as if the pact had been unofficially concluded, its warships following one another there at a steady pace. In April, several of them were filmed unloading thousands of tons of weapons without any concern for discretion.
“We wondered who this material was intended for,” says Professor Virginie Collombier, head of the Libya Platform at the LUISS Guido Carli University in Rome. “A certain quantity probably remained in Libya, but a large part went down to be transported towards Burkina Faso, on the important Burkina-Niger-Mali road and on the other side towards Sudan. Russia has indeed an interest in using Libya as a platform and springboard towards the Sahel countries. And Saddam’s visit to Ouagadougou is probably also linked to this.” Is Haftar acting as Putin’s doorman?
In many ways, the diplomacy deployed by Khalifa Haftar is contradictory: in Sudan, he supports the forces of the dissident General Hemetti against those of General Burhan , the head of state supported by Egypt, a major supporter of Benghazi. He has welcomed French soldiers as well as Russian mercenaries from the ex-Wagner on his bases, and seeks to maintain good relations with Paris while giving himself to Moscow.
He has recently been getting closer to the Turks, who are sponsors of his rivals in Tripoli, but are attracted by the prospects of promising contracts for the reconstruction and development of the region. And this ardent defender – in words – of the Palestinian cause is even said to have sent the same Saddam son to Israel as a secret embassy in November 2021, according to serious Israeli media.
“In fact, he seeks as much to pose as an internationally accepted statesman as to serve his alliance with Russia and to position himself as the essential intermediary for the Sahel region with this message to Westerners: ‘You are forced to leave the Sahel and I, who fight like you against terrorism, I speak with these regimes. I have the ear of the Kremlin and I can assert your interests with these parties with whom you no longer communicate'”, analyzes Jalel Harchaoui. His position could thus be in line with the new African strategy that France intends to implement to remedy the loss of many of its positions, while anxiously watching the Chad of the new Déby, a box that has become essential to its African game, move dangerously closer to Moscow.
Initiatives that anger Cairo and Moscow
France “created an “Africa Command” entrusted, on June 26, to General Pascal Lanni. Its mission: to establish “security partnerships with countries that request it”, in order first to collect intelligence for the fight against terrorism, reported Le Canard enchaîné in its July 14 edition. Will France’s African reorientation make Haftar one of its trump cards in the northern half of the continent? Complex, the marshal’s balancing act, which extends his local geopolitics of opportunistic partnerships and which has so far succeeded for him, is not without risk, because by wanting to have everyone’s ear, one ends up becoming suspect in the eyes of all, as the case of little Qatar has shown.
And Haftar is upsetting Cairo, which sees this attitude as a lack of loyalty, as well as Moscow, which would like a more docile marshal : these capitals could be tempted to find a replacement for him. On the other side, his now strategic alliance with Putin has prompted his former supporters in the West, first and foremost France, to distance themselves from him since the reactivation of the Ukrainian conflict in 2022. But Haftar holds a trump card, convinced, probably rightly, that no one would be able to find a replacement for him on the current Libyan scene.
Saddam Haftar’s visit to Ouagadougou therefore aims as much to make the marshal the link between a security alliance from Moscow to Conakry, the essential intermediary in the region for international powers that have interests there, as to build the legitimacy of his power with putschist heads of state, in search of the same international legitimacy, and by projecting his influence regionally.
“Since 2011, Libya has lost the external influence it had under Gaddafi. Many of my Libyan interlocutors are upset about this and its actors have lost the ability to understand and interact with their regional environment, in North Africa and beyond on the continent, which is a big gap. However, with this episode, it is the first time that we see a regional diplomatic projection of this order,” analyzes Virginie Collombier.
Saddam for security, Belkacem for the economy
Certainly, Libyan leaders, from both the East and the West, are increasing their international visits and receiving streams of diplomats. But the calculation is internal, with the aim of ensuring political legitimacy, economic partnerships and the continued support of their foreign sponsors, Egypt, Russia and the Emirates on the Benghazi side, Turkey and to a lesser extent Algeria and Qatar on the Tripoli side.
And the researcher concludes: “The capture of this empty box is a move in Haftar’s overall strategy , which aims to ensure control of a certain number of essential levers. Thus, having had his hand on the security lever for a long time, he has made his army the central pillar of the economy on the Egyptian model. The clandestine economy is also in his power and he is even involved in humanitarian work, his son Belkacem having been placed at the head of the fund for development and reconstruction after the catastrophic flooding of Derna in September 2023, with enormous economic stakes behind it. In a context where everyone expects to see the 80-year-old marshal, who suffered a stroke in 2018, disappear overnight, and where no one can know what will happen the next day, the father and his sons are trying to lock up as much as possible the various cogs essential to the control of the parts of the country in their power.”
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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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