As this volume on Libya's foreign policy goes to print, Libyans are experiencing the most serious political upheaval since the 1969 revolution. A small-scale non-violent demonstration staged by less than a hundred lawyers outside the court of Benghazi in mid-February 2011, initially intended solely to mark a ‘day of rage’ to remember the 2006 killing of a dozen Libyan demonstrators, has flared into outright civil war. Within days Libya became a country divided in two: the family and diehard supporters of Muammar al-Qadhafi flanked by some 10,000 men of the Libyan army on one side and an opposition movement consisting mainly of former politicians of the regime and defected army units joined by enthusiastic but untrained Libyan youths on the other.
Aside from the incendiary enthusiasm that the successful revolutions in neighbouring Tunisia and Egypt had unleashed a few weeks earlier, what fuelled this revolt was the extent of violence used by the regime against the demonstrators. Libyans were appalled to hear reports of civilian deaths and see footage that captured the shooting of unarmed demonstrators on the streets of Benghazi. More than 200 people were killed during the first few days of the protests under the direct order of the regime's Security Chief, Abdullah al-Sanusi, and Saadi al-Qadhafi, one of the Libyan leader's sons, who was in command of what witnesses have reported being African mercenaries. Videos showing government personnel removing corpses from the streets within minutes of their being shot and cleaning the blood off the tarmac in order to erase any public evidence of the killings emboldened many, especially in the eastern province of Cyrenaica, to turn their backs to the regime. In Tripoli early calls to protest against the leader of the revolution brought several thousand men to Green Square where Libyan flags and portraits of the leader were burned. But that initial enthusiasm waned rapidly when high numbers of security forces began patrolling the streets. Tripoli has since witnessed only few occasional episodes of open defiance during Friday prayers.
So far the opposition movement has gained military control of most of Cyrenaica, the country's eastern province, as well as the towns of al-Zawiya and Misurata in the outskirts of Tripoli and most of the Jebel Nafusa, the mountain ridge south of Tripoli. It has also set up a National Transitional Council that claims to be the legitimate representative of the Libyan people. This initiative is led by Qadhafi's former Minister of Justice, Mustafa Abd Al-Jalil, who joined the insurgents in the first few days after the outburst of violence in Benghazi. Some Libyan embassies abroad have proclaimed their allegiance to the opposition movement, as have most Libyan officials representing the Libyan Arab Jamahiriyya within international organisations such as the United Nations (UN). Some Libyan tribes have taken sides with the insurgents, while others continue to side with the government.
Despite overwhelming and perhaps naïve enthusiasm, which led the Libyan opposition to believe that Qadhafi's power structure would soon collapse and the taking of Tripoli to be a matter of days, the regime is still holding out. It controls the country's capital, where most of its inhabitants are terrorised and sheltered in their homes, while a few (perhaps coerced) rally to proclaim their allegiance to the regime. The Tripoli government also controls the city of Sirt, a Qadhafi stronghold halfway between Tripoli and Benghazi, and the desert capital of Sebha. The regime has blackened out most foreign media broadcasts and the internet, and telephone lines are constantly interrupted, thus leaving most residents of the capital with no source of information other than the state-controlled television station imbued with government propaganda. The inhabitants of the desert towns in Libya's most southern region, the Fezzan, have so far proclaimed their neutrality in the ongoing conflict.
In the light of the rising death toll and the escalation of violence, the UN as well as the European Union issued sanctions against Libya, while the International Criminal Court at The Hague started investigations into crimes against humanity allegedly perpetuated by the Qadhafi regime. The UN and NATO are considering imposing a no-fly zone over Libya, while some international activists are lobbying for an outright international intervention on the basis of the fairly recent assumption of the ‘responsibility to protect’ citizens from predatory governments. Others argue in favour of targeted air raids against Qadhafi's strongholds, including his Bab al-Aziziya fortified palace in Tripoli. While deciding what the next military move, if any, ought to be, the US and several Arab and European nations have also begun to freeze the Qadhafi family bank accounts and the assets of the Libyan sovereign wealth fund.
Since the beginning of the conflict, some 2,000 people are reported to have died and over 200,000 foreign workers have fled the country, gathering in makeshift refugee camps along the Tunisian and Egyptian border. Oil and gas production has almost completely halted. Air raids and direct military confrontations take place daily in the coastal area between Sirt and Benghazi, but since the beginning of the conflict neither of the two sides has made significant advances.
With the current stalemate, Libya's future has never been so clouded with uncertainty. Scholars, as well as policy makers, journalists and activists are unable to predict where the current conflict may lead to and what type of Libya will emerge from the smoke of the anti-aircraft fire that has occasionally struck Libya's desert plains during the past few weeks.
The Libya we have just depicted is obviously markedly different from the country that the articles published in this volume refer to. A few authors included in this volume, al-Atrash, Joffé, Zoubir and Paoletti, first presented their research at the 2009 conference ‘Libya: legacy of the past, challenges for the future.’Footnote1 Two more articles, those by Joffé and Paoletti, Huliaras and Maglivers, were solicited specifically for this volume. The 2009 conference, organised by Alan George, Emanuela Paoletti, Michael Willis and myself, coincided with the 40th anniversary of Qadhafi’s revolution of September 1969. As the title of the conference suggests, our aim was to trace a balance of Libya's domestic and foreign policy over the previous 40 years and of the outcomes of the reform process that Libya appeared to have undertaken since the international community lifted its sanctions in 2004. At the time of the conference, Libya's Qadhafi staged fancy multi-million dollar celebrations in Tripoli to commemorate the revolution's anniversary. Then, more than ever, the regime appeared to be in firm control of the country. Libyan foreign policy, whilst retaining a certain degree of unpredictability, seemed to be firmly geared towards increased collaboration with Western powers, even if at the expense of Qadhafi's professed pan-African commitment. Nothing at the time made scholars, analysts or diplomats suspect that little more than a year later such a momentous change would brush aside, perhaps forever, the image of an ever-powerful Qadhafi.
Even in mid-January 2011, when the protests in Tunisia had already brought down President Zine al Abidine Ben Ali and thousands of Egyptians took to the streets demanding Hosni Mubarak's resignation, Libya seemed to be immune from the revolutionary waves that had originated along its neighbours' shores. The prevailing consensus at the time was that the country's tight security apparatus and media censorship, along with with relatively low rates of unemployment (compared to its neighbouring countries), a rapid GDP growth and Qadhafi 's improved ties with foreign powers, would enable the Arab world's longest serving leader to resist what Mubarak and Ben Ali had been unable to. The reality, however, turned out to be very different.
The articles contained in this volume provide a detailed analysis of Libya's external relations during Qadhafi's 42-year rule. They address the shifts and balances that characterised the Jamahiriya's engagements beyond its borders, as well as the ideological underpinning of Libyan foreign policy. These two aspects of Libyan politics, which have so far retained a relatively marginal place in the academic literature on Libya that has been mainly concerned with its domestic politics, are essential in understanding Libya's past as well as its tumultuous present.
Libyan foreign policy was far from being solely irrational and unpredictable, as observers who could only detect the impulsive and erratic nature of the leader's decisions have often stated. As a matter of fact, most of the articles contained in this volume show that, to a certain extent, strategic and ideological expectations often informed Libya's bilateral and multilateral dealings.
In her essay on Libya's migration policy, Paoletti debunks the notion that controlled chaos characterised Libya's attitude toward migration. Instead she identifies a deeper trend, whereby migration proved to be a strategic device for putting political and economic pressure on specific countries. Migration was employed strategically for domestic economic objectives as well as to further foreign-policy interests, vis-à-vis Africa and Europe. Paoletti and Joffé's study of the inner mechanisms of the decision-making process within the Jamahiriya's Foreign Affairs bureau shows that what moves the broader decision-making process is a mixture of ideology, pragmatism and opportunism. Interestingly, the authors identify anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism as the main ideological banners for Qadhafi's call for pan-Arabism first and African integration later. A third ideological base, according to the authors, is the belief in national unity around shared cultural paradigms, which also informs Libya's gradual rejection of Arabism and the country's subsequent embrace of pan-Africanism. In Joffé's analysis of EU–Libya relations, Qadhafi's long-lasting anti-colonial ambitions are once again emphasised as the possible driving force behind the regime's handling of the European Partnership Agreement and the Italian–Libyan Treaty of Friendship. The Libyan leader has often referred to the latter as the model reparation agreement that all former colonised countries should strive to achieve from the former colonial masters. In their detailed article on Libya–African relations, Huliaras and Magliveras highlight the central importance that a shared African identity continues to play in the Libyan state's national ideology and its foreign policy. However, they, more so than other authors writing in this volume, underscore that volatility continues to be the crucial characteristic of Libya's foreign policy. Volatility also characterises Libya's relations with its North African neighbours, as Atrash's article demonstrates. The author, however, emphasises that Libya's ideological and military support to the Polisario Front was the one issue where Libya's foreign policy has been relatively consistent from 1975 onwards. The Saharawi cause became the main strategic and ideological basis that triggered the sudden shifts and struggles between Libya and the other states involved in the conflict, especially Morocco. Zoubir's analysis of US–Libyan relations does not attempt, unlike the other essays, to find an ideological and strategic coherence behind Qadhafi's foreign policy. The author, in fact, appears to award little agency to Libya in the decision-making process that led to the gradual rapprochement between the two countries. Instead of looking at possible Libyan strategic unspoken motivations that might have pushed Qadhafi to warm to the United States, Zoubir views the improvement of diplomatic ties between the two countries primarily in the function of the success of the United State's use of coercive diplomacy, which left Libya with little room to manoeuvre. ‘The cost of noncompliance would have been higher than the benefits of compliance,’ as Zoubir put it.
Aside from the long and medium term appreciation of the shifts and goals of Libya's foreign policy, the essays that follow provide us also with a fresh perspective that we can directly relate to and through which we can better understand some features of Qadhafi's reactions to the February 2011 protests. As we have said more in general in relation to the regime's foreign policy, arguing that irrational attitudes and personal whims inform decision-making process of the Libyan government is a simplistic and often reductionist view even when applied to the current situation. A deeper level of analysis forces us to acknowledge that even in those rambling rants, which Qadhafi made frequently as a wall of international condemnation was building around him, were not the product of a man whose sanity had gone astray, as some members of the international media were quick to suggest. As in the case of most major foreign policy decisions that the Libyan leader has taken, his sudden international isolation and unwillingness to give in to the opposition and to the international community can be viewed as another expression of his ideological commitment to anti-imperialism that has so often characterised his foreign policy over 42 years. These articles allow us to contextualise the turbulent present and uncertain future of Libya.
Notes
The organisers are grateful to the Middle East Centre at St. Antony's College (Oxford), the John Fell Fund of Oxford University, the American Institute for Maghrib Studies (AIMS), the Society for Libyan Studies and the Maison Française in Oxford for their support.