This transformation has not emerged in isolation. This is not just the result of governance failures, but of historical grievances rooted in colonial legacies, the spread of jihadist ideology through regional conflicts, the repeated failure of external actors to adapt their strategies to local dynamics and of narrow geopolitical interests. The US, turning a blind eye to the security vacuum in Sahel, is making the same mistake it made in Afghanistan.

The colonial echoes

The Sahel region was colonized by France in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, significantly shaping its development. The French solely on resource extraction and exploitation, neglecting its governance. When they drew the borders of the Sahel, they drew them arbitrarily, dividing ethnic groups across different countries and weakening national cohesion.��

After independence in 1960, frustration grew among nomadic and tribal groups as the already limited governance began to fail, marking the start of extremism and rebellion. This rebellion and violent tendencies escalated when the Sahel was hit by famine and (especially the 1968-73 drought), and escalated further in the 1980s, with issues such as banditry, kidnapping, extortion and the killing of French citizens.

The beginning of jihad in the Sahel��

The Sahel region practiced moderate Sufi Islam, but the North African region soon saw the first signs of jihadi conflict — specifically the outbreak of the Algerian civil war in 1991, when the government out of fear that Islamist forces might gain power.��

Islamist forces quickly capitalized on growing public disillusionment with the state, leading to the creation of radicalized armed groups. The military’s intervention and subsequent coup escalated the conflict into a civil war, creating a political vacuum that enabled Islamist groups to establish a foothold. 

Concurrently, in 1992, Osama Bin Laden relocated to Sudan, where he set up Al-Qaeda’s training camps and business operations. This move signaled Al-Qaeda’s growing interest in the region and its strategic potential. The of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania underscored how North and East Africa had become increasingly integrated into Al-Qaeda’s transnational agenda.

By 2007, the Algerian Armed Islamic Group had pledged allegiance to Al-Qaeda and rebranded itself as Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (). From there, AQIM expanded southward into Mali and Niger, using smuggling and banditry to finance its terror activities. This southward shift gained further momentum after the 9/11 attacks, as the US-led war on terror displaced jihadist networks from the Middle East and South Asia, pushing them to seek new bases of operation in regions like the Sahel — where porous borders and unstable governments offered strategic opportunity.

As the mid-2000s approached, a distinct jihadist landscape had begun to take shape in the Sahel, one that would be further reinforced after the of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya in 2011.

Expansion of the jihadi landscape

The fall of Gaddafi created a political and security vacuum that Al-Qaeda was quick to exploit, especially in Mali. With the collapse of Gaddafi’s regime, significant of weapons spilled into the region.��

Among those freed were Tuareg who had served as mercenaries under Gaddafi. These fighters later aligned with AQIM, strengthening Al-Qaeda. Their alliance was further shaped by the Tuaregs’ separatist desire for autonomy in Mali’s Azawad region, sparking a rebellion in 2012 that quickly took on a militant Islamist character.��

By April that year, Islamist forces had seized control of key northern cities in Mali, marking a fresh surge in jihadist activity across the region.

Consolidation of�� the jihadist wave��

By 2013, Western governments began acknowledging the growing terrorist threat in the Sahel. France launched to oust jihadist groups from northern Mali. The mission succeeded in dislodging militants from major urban areas — but it pushed them deeper into the countryside and across national borders, allowing them to regroup and destabilize the region more.��

France followed this with between 2014 and 2022, aimed at regional stabilization. But progress stalled. French troops encountered resistance not just from insurgents, but from local populations with deep-seated resentment linked to France’s . As these military interventions struggled to deliver long-term security, political instability, poverty and governance failures deepened, creating conditions that Islamist groups readily exploited to recruit and radicalize.

A dangerous convergence: jihadist unity and coups

ISIS made its into the Sahel in 2015, prompting a breakaway faction from AQIM to pledge allegiance and form the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS). Two years later, Al-Qaeda responded by consolidating its presence. AQIM merged with Ansar al-Dine and al-Mourabitoun to form Jama’at Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin (JNIM), a powerful group that is now the behind jihadist operations in the region.

The political environment further deteriorated from 2020 onwards, as swept through the Sahel, weakening already fragile governments. These conditions enabled ISGS and Al-Qaeda to entrench themselves further.��

As criminal activities increased, these terror groups adopted banditry with jihadist motives, creating what is called “”, encouraging criminal groups to adopt jihadist ideologies and migrate into terrorism. This has significantly bolstered Al-Qaeda and ISIS’s presence in the Sahel in recent years.��

The consequences have been staggering: in 2023, Sahel accounted for of all terrorism-related deaths worldwide, a number that grew to in 2024. Burkina Faso alone recorded fatalities in 2022, making it the world’s most terror-affected country.

Narrow geopolitics and limited attention��

Africa has steadily become central to global geopolitics and geoeconomics, particularly due to its of rare earth minerals and gold. Yet, in the Sahel, these resources remain largely untapped, overshadowed by an entrenched security crisis and volatile political environment.��

After France’s military withdrawal, the region saw the arrival of Russia’s , a private mercenary or paramilitary force. The Sahel’s military juntas welcomed Wagner for the short-term promise of security support and the political leverage it offered through alignment with Moscow. However, Wagner’s presence has not translated into lasting stability. Its activities have remained largely focused on securing Russian interests and gold mining operations, rather than providing a serious or coordinated response to the region’s security challenges.��

Despite the presence of Russian forces and the persistence of jihadist activity, the United States has kept the Sahel at a strategic priority.

Washington has avoided deeper engagement, the absence of a direct or immediate national security threat. But a primary reason is that the US likely considers involvement in African conflicts risky, given its haunting past with the Somali crisis, where it faced one of its biggest failures: . But the operation failed due to overconfident and patterned operational planning with a lack of contingency and strong communication on the ground, none of which are unavoidable in future operations.����

During the 90s, Sahel did not emerge as a direct threat, and the US focus remained on security issues in East Africa and Al-Qaeda. 

However, the Sahel region has gradually become a direct threat to the US after the 2011 Libyan , and the threat increased greatly by 2017, when ISIS cadres in Africa gained strength. The 2017 Tongo Tongo in Niger, where ISGS fighters killed four US Special Forces soldiers, underscored the growing threat to US personnel in the region.��

The apprehension was echoed by General , head of US Africa Command, who warned in 2024 that Sahel-based terrorist groups could develop the capacity to strike the US homeland if left unchecked.

While the US did maintain a surveillance and reconnaissance in Niger for some time, this was withdrawn in 2024, alongside France’s broader . The departure of Western forces, combined with Russia’s limited effectiveness, has left a fragile security landscape in which terror groups are once again finding space to operate.

A recurring blind spot in US counterterrorism

The United States’ counterterrorism strategy has repeatedly failed to anticipate the evolution of jihadist networks, particularly when they have emerged from outside conventional theaters of war.

The 1998 embassy bombings were orchestrated from Afghanistan, exploiting a blind spot in US regional threat assessments; the US grossly underestimated Al-Qaeda’s transnational reach. Similarly, during the Algerian civil war in the 1990s, the alignment between Algerian Islamist factions and Al-Qaeda to form a secret jihadist revolution in Africa went largely unacknowledged by US intelligence, despite clear that they were building contacts with the global terror network. In Somalia, the US once again the regional Islamist force, Al-Itihaad al-Islamiya, while focusing on humanitarian operations. This misjudgment contributed to the emergence of Al-Shabaab, now a dominant Al-Qaeda affiliate in East Africa.��

The list doesn’t end here; the US also failed to act when ideological convergence between jihadist groups and narcotics cartels grew in Colombia (a country with which it shares strong security cooperation on narcotics issues), which led to cartel bombings in 1998. A now sustains Al-Qaeda’s operations in the Sahel, with JNIM heavily depending on a drug smuggling network.��

Yet, Washington’s strategic assessments have continued to downplay this growing narco-terror convergence.

The threat of resurgence is now common; the real danger is that terror groups are acquiring the capabilities necessary for transnational terror attacks. Without a shift in strategic posture — one that moves beyond narrow geopolitical interests and accounts for the full complexity of threats — another major wave of global jihadists may be inevitable.

[ edited this piece.]

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“We gotta get that solved. Gaza is—it’s a tragedy and [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu] wants to get it solved, and I want to get it solved, and I think the other side wants to get it solved. A lot of hate, long-term hate, but we think we’re going to have it solved pretty soon—hopefully with a real solution, a solution that’s going to be holding up.”

�մǻ岹��’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Get it solved:

Make other people do things that correspond to the solution you want to see, irrespective of their or anyone else’s interests. The opposite of solve.

Contextual note

Trump’s language with reference to time must never be taken literally. What does he mean when he promises to “have it solved pretty soon?”

The peace candidate of 2024 promised to resolve the war in Ukraine “within 24 hours” once he had the keys to the White House in his hands. Not only has that not happened, there has been no progress on the various verbal initiatives he has taken. Most experts now believe that the war will either continue for years or end when Ukraine’s army and government collapse.

Trump can be quick and decisive, however. Didn’t he successfully apply his “in, boom, out” Trump biographer Michael Wolff claims he had announced days before “obliterating” Iran’s nuclear program by dropping multiple bunker-buster bombs?

Most serious observers believe that the current pause in hostilities after the “12-day war” is due to a on the part of Netanyahu’s government that had begun to panic at the extensive damage the Iranians were capable of inflicting on Israel’s military installations over the course of that brief conflict. Those same observers expect that the peace will be broken, most probably by Israel at a more convenient time. So long as the idea can be maintained that the US intervention has eliminated any prospect for Iran of advancing with its nuclear program, the “peace” is likely to hold. But even US intelligence appears to believe that the program has only been delayed, not destroyed. Few, however, countenance the idea that either Israel or the US has abandoned its ultimate goal of achieving regime change in Iran.

As for Gaza, Trump’s promise to “get it solved” rang particularly hollow as most experts see no basis for agreement between Israel and Hamas. Journalist Jeremy Scahill at Drop Site what most acknowledge to be obvious: “Since Donald Trump announced on July 1 that a Gaza ceasefire deal was likely, if not imminent, Israel has sought to sabotage negotiations through well-worn methods in an effort to block a deal that would end the war.” �� �� ��

Some attribute to Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, the great French diplomat who not only advised Napoleon Bonaparte but was instrumental in conserving France’s pivotal role after the Corsican’s defeat and banishment, the remark, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” (“The more things change, the more it’s the same thing”). To some extent, diplomacy — when it is applied seriously — serves to defend the long durée by seeking to avoid radical disruption, which rather than bringing about any kind of change tends to produce chaos. The disruptive approach of US foreign policy, especially over the past quarter of a century, offers a perfect illustration of such consequences, especially in the Middle East. Libya and Syria stand as exemplary of the trend.

Trump cannot escape from a mode of thinking conditioned by the reflex now built solidly into US culture: “time is money.” Americans feel the proverbial expression as a permanent pressure on them to act quickly and avoid spending too much time on working things out. They apply it to business as well as politics.

When applied to the realm of diplomacy, we might want to call it the doctrine of “soonism.” If you manage things on the basis of “sooner rather than later” you don’t allow yourself the time to fully understand the issues you’re trying to deal with. Unfortunately, Trump isn’t alone, nor is he the worst example. US President George W. Bush’s insistence on punishing Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein for possessing nonexistent weapons of mass destruction with “Shock and Awe” was a far worse example of soonism than anything Trump has done. “We will fight them over there,” Bush, “so we do not have to face them in the United States of America.”

US President Joe Biden’s precipitation in seeking to immediately Russia from the SWIFT network based on the belief that he would reduce the ruble to “rubble,” while at the same time refusing to engage in diplomacy and, at the same time, instructing UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, to ensure that ongoing diplomacy be disrupted, provides another example of disastrous soonism. His team seriously believed that by acting quickly, Russia would not have the time to react. We now know that his calculation was erroneous. As a result, more than a million people have died, with no end in sight.

Soonism is the enemy of diplomacy, a form of traditional human communication based on the principle of taking the time to understand the stakes and hammer out possible solutions to unresolvable conflicts. The current debate around ending the war in Ukraine, which Trump promised to do in 24 hours, turns around two contrasting positions. On the Ukrainian and transatlantic side, it’s a “30-day ceasefire.” Thirty days is a value that corresponds to soonism. On the Russian side, it’s the examination of the “root causes.” Those roots descend deep into the landscape and have grown over time. They don’t belong to any short-term timeframe.

Is any other explanation needed for the easily observable fact that diplomacy has become an extinct art form?

Historical note

History advances through moments that may be short or prolonged. Many students of history, anthropology and sociology have noted the contrast between two extreme orientations of national or regional cultures. At one extreme is the idea that history can be understood as a series of dramatic events, often framed as showdowns between opposing parties or interests. In such cultures, people acquire a view of history as a series of “significant dates” at which different percussive events have redefined the course of history. At the opposite extreme, we find cultures that privilege the idea of the. They see even dramatic events and radical shifts of influence within power structures as blips on the radar. In their view, history plods on with the weight of a civilization’s mass, evolving slowly over time, while maintaining a stable worldview.

Trump, habituated to US business culture focused on short-term decision making, has a habit of seeing future events as happening “soon,” as all his recent comments on Gaza reveal. In typical Trumpian style, apparently referring to events that played out in 2005, he his judgment of Israel’s decision at the time to pull its settlers out of Gaza. “The Gaza strip. I call it the Gaza strip. One of the worst real estate deals ever made. They gave up the oceanfront property. It was supposed to bring peace, and it didn’t bring peace. It brought the opposite. But we’re doing pretty well on Gaza. I think we could have something fairly soon to talk about.”

We might see this “soon to talk about” as a step back from a few days earlier when he said, “we think we’re going to have it solved pretty soon.” Talk is cheap. But the notion of solving generally supposes some kind of lasting duration, even if not necessarily the historiographer’s longue durée. Last week it was about solving, this week about talk. That seems to be a pattern with Trump. He bandies about theoretical solutions, such as , the of Greenland and the of Canada, or building a on the Gaza coast. This makes for animated conversation, but anything resembling a solution somehow fades from our collective memory as a project or even a possibility.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of 51�Թ� Devil’s Dictionary.]

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People are wondering today what role the United States has played in the events in the region since 2011. A leaked State Department from December 2012 signed by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton throws some light on that role with regard to Syria.

Wondering how ChatGPT might help to put these facts into a new historical perspective, I proposed the following prompt:

“Wikileaks published a State Department memo signed by Hillary Clinton and dated December 31, 2012. It was officially declassified in November 2015. In it, the Obama administration clearly defined the policy it intended to implement with regard to Syria. One statement in that email might seem surprising today is this:

‘But other than the laudable purpose of saving Libyan civilians from likely attacks by Qadaffi’s regime, the Libyan operation had no long-lasting consequences for the region.’

Given that a lot of things have happened in Libya since then, how accurate is this denial of long-lasting consequences?”

“The assertion from the Obama administration that the 2011 intervention in Libya ‘had no long-lasting consequences for the region’ appears deeply inaccurate when viewed in retrospect. The situation in Libya and its broader impact on the region has had profound and far-reaching consequences, many of which continue to unfold. Here’s an overview of the long-lasting effects:

1. Libya’s Fragmentation and Persistent Instability

• After the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, Libya descended into political and social chaos. The country fractured into a patchwork of competing militias, tribal factions, and rival governments.
• By 2014, the conflict escalated into a full-scale civil war, pitting the internationally recognized Government of National Accord (GNA) in Tripoli against forces loyal to General Khalifa Haftar in the east (Libyan National Army – LNA).
• The collapse of state authority left a power vacuum that remains largely unfilled to this day, leading to a prolonged state of instability.

2. Militancy, Terrorism, and Proliferation of Armed Groups

• The fall of Gaddafi led to the unchecked spread of weapons across Libya and neighboring regions. Libya became an arms hub, supplying weapons to insurgents, militias, and terrorists throughout North Africa and the Sahel.
• Extremist groups, including Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and ISIS, exploited Libya’s chaos to gain a foothold. In 2015, ISIS even established a stronghold in the city of Sirte.
• This has turned Libya into a base for jihadist networks and a staging ground for terrorist operations across the region.

3. Regional Spillover Effects: The Sahel and Beyond

• One of the most significant consequences of Libya’s collapse was the destabilization of Mali and the broader Sahel region.
• After Gaddafi’s fall, Tuareg fighters who had served in his army returned to northern Mali with weapons, leading to the 2012 Tuareg rebellion. This rebellion was quickly overtaken by Islamist militants, plunging Mali into crisis.
• This instability has spread throughout the Sahel, with countries like Niger, Burkina Faso, and Chad struggling to contain growing insurgencies fueled by weapons and fighters spilling out of Libya.

4. The Refugee and Migrant Crisis

• Libya became a major transit hub for refugees and migrants seeking to cross the Mediterranean Sea to Europe. The absence of effective state authority has allowed human trafficking networks to thrive.
• This contributed significantly to the European migrant crisis in 2015, straining EU resources and fueling political tensions across the continent.

5. Geopolitical Competition in Libya

• Libya has become a theater for proxy wars involving foreign powers. Countries such as Turkey, Russia, the UAE, Egypt, and others have backed rival factions, turning the conflict into an internationalized proxy struggle.
• Russia’s increasing involvement in Libya (through the Wagner Group) has added a new dimension to geopolitical competition in North Africa.

6. Economic Collapse and Humanitarian Crisis

• Libya’s oil-dependent economy, once a source of prosperity, has been devastated by the conflict. Oil production has been repeatedly disrupted by battles between factions.
• The humanitarian situation remains dire, with millions of Libyans affected by conflict, food insecurity, and lack of healthcare.

Conclusion: Far-Reaching and Ongoing Consequences

The Obama administration’s statement in 2012—claiming no long-lasting regional consequences—significantly underestimated the fallout of the Libyan intervention. The collapse of the Libyan state triggered a chain reaction that destabilized the Sahel, contributed to the rise of terrorism, fueled migration crises, and intensified geopolitical competition. Today, Libya remains a symbol of the unintended consequences of foreign interventions, with its instability continuing to impact regional and global dynamics.”

I continued the conversation with the following prompt.

“The Clinton email contains the following recommendations: ‘Washington should start by expressing its willingness to work with regional allies like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar to organize, train and arm Syrian rebel forces. The announcement of such a decision would, by itself, likely cause substantial defections from the Syrian military. Then, using territory in Turkey and possibly Jordan, U.S. diplomats and Pentagon officials can start strengthening the opposition. It will take time. But the rebellion is going to go on for a long time, with or without U.S. involvement. The second step is to develop international support for a coalition air operation. Russia will never support such a mission, so there is no point operating through the UN Security Council. Some argue that U.S. involvement risks a wider war with Russia. But the Kosovo example shows otherwise.’

‘Arming the Syrian rebels and using western air power to ground Syrian helicopters and airplanes is a low-cost high payoff approach.’

Does this accurately represent the role the US has played over the past 13 years?”

Below is a short version of ChatGPT’s response, including only the initial assessment and conclusion.

“The recommendations outlined in the Clinton email—organizing, arming, and supporting Syrian rebels, combined with a potential coalition air operation—reflect ideas that did, to some extent, align with U.S. policy in the Syrian conflict. However, the email oversimplifies the complexities of U.S. involvement and the consequences that unfolded. Over the past 13 years, the U.S. role in Syria has been shaped by a series of strategic choices, hesitations, and unintended consequences. Here’s a more accurate analysis of U.S. involvement in Syria since 2011:

Conclusion: Partial Alignment, but Limited Success

The email’s recommendations—arming rebels, organizing opposition forces, and using air power—align with aspects of U.S. policy, but the outcomes were far more complex and problematic:

• The U.S. did arm and train rebels, but with limited success due to fragmentation and extremist infiltration.
• The U.S. focused on ISIS rather than Assad, abandoning broader regime-change goals as the war progressed.
• A no-fly zone or air operation against the Syrian regime never materialized, largely due to fears of direct conflict with Russia.
• The conflict evolved into a geopolitical quagmire involving Russia, Iran, Turkey, and others, limiting U.S. influence.

In hindsight, the claim that this approach would be ‘low-cost and high-payoff’ was overly optimistic. The Syrian conflict became a prolonged and devastating war with significant human, political, and geopolitical consequences—many of which remain unresolved to this day.”

I must add one final observation concerning ChatGPT’s curious claim that “the email oversimplifies the complexities of U.S. involvement and the consequences that unfolded.” ChatGPT clearly lives in the eternal present. Unlike most of us, it confuses the future and past. What can it possibly mean to say that an email from 2012 “oversimplifies” events that took over the following 13 years? You can only oversimplify a complexity that already exists, not a future one.

This exchange underlines a more fundamental problem of oversimplification: the kind of strategic decision-making that has occurred regularly in the formulation of US foreign policy. ChatGTP points to this when it notes that the email “underestimated the fallout of the Libyan intervention.”

This formulation is itself an understatement. The email foresaw “no long-lasting consequences.” “No” means zero. ChatGPT lists 15 grouped under six headings. There’s quite a gap between 0 and 15. But isn’t that part of a pattern that has been repeated in Iran in 1953; Vietnam in 1964, Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, to mention only those from prominent cases?

Your thoughts

Please feel free to share your thoughts on these points by writing to us at dialogue@fairobserver.com. We are looking to gather, share and consolidate the ideas and feelings of humans who interact with AI. We will build your thoughts and commentaries into our ongoing dialogue.

*[Artificial Intelligence is rapidly becoming a feature of everyone’s daily life. We unconsciously perceive it either as a friend or foe, a helper or destroyer. At 51�Թ�, we see it as a tool of creativity, capable of revealing the complex relationship between humans and machines.]

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In response, Arab autocrats are scrambling to squash what they fear could evolve into a third wave of protests in little more than a decade. The autocrats have deployed tools ranging from cracking down on street protests to increased repression to engaging in perfunctory dialogue. They’ve made concessions and economic aid to defuse exploding and potential future powder kegs.

The third wave of protests since the Arab Spring

The latest protests erupted after street agitation across the Middle East bookended the last decade.

In the early 2010s, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Saudi Arabia and Egypt relied on security force violence, military interventions and support for conservatives and rebel militias to roll back the achievements of the 2011 popular revolts that toppled the long-standing autocratic leaders of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen.

Uprisings erupted again in 2019 and 2020 in Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon and Sudan. A combination of autocratic political maneuvering and the Covid pandemic defanged them, often with devastating consequences.

Analysts, journalists and academics argued that counterrevolutionary measures had replaced the 2011 Arab Spring with a prolonged Arab Winter. The latest protests, however, suggest the winter’s snow may be melting.

This month, Iran braces for the September 16 first anniversary of Masha Amini’s death. Amini died under suspicious circumstances in the custody of Iran’s religious police, who detained her for allegedly wearing her headscarf loosely. Amini’s death sparked months of street protests in which killed 530 people and arrested more than 22,000. Since then, popular defiance has turned , cultural , courthouses and into protest and civil disobedience venues. “Wrong decisions may have painful consequences for the establishment. People cannot take more pressure. If it continues, we will witness street protests again,” a former government official .

Syria has seen almost two weeks of sustained mass anti-government protests in the Druze-populated southwest province of Suwayda, long a pro-government stronghold. The demands for the fall of President Bashar al-Assad are resonating in the neighboring Sunni region of Daraa and even Assad’s Alawite stronghold of Latakia. “Initially, Assad probably thought, ‘I have won and we can let this happen; we can let the Druze let off some steam.’ It turned out to be a mistake from the Assad point of view, and Assad’s military will have to keep him in power,” Syria expert Joshua Landis.

Authorities in Bahrain have so far failed to end a widening, more than three-week-long by 800 prisoners, or at least 20% of the Gulf state’s prison population, by acceding to some demands for improved incarceration conditions.

Libyan security forces were this week on the streets of the capital, Tripoli, to prevent renewed protests against a meeting between since dismissed Foreign Minister Najla al-Mangoush and her Israeli counterpart, Eli Cohen. The protests heaped pressure on Libya’s internationally recognized interim national unity government to step down and make way for a new administration.

Similarly to Iran, has been rocked by nine months of protests — even if Israeli pro-democracy demonstrations have focused on opposition to Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu’s judicial reforms, with no reference to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands.

In Iraq, Arab and Turkmen protesters opposed to a Kurdish political presence in the disputed multi-ethnic city of Kirkuk clashed with Kurds this weekend, suggesting could rejoin the list of Middle Eastern countries experiencing social unrest. Authorities initially imposed a curfew in Kirkuk after four people were killed in the protests.

Could Egypt be next?

Supporters of President Abdul Fatah al-Sisi, including the UAE, worry Egypt could be the next to witness a renewed wave of protests.

“There’s a feeling people aren’t comfortable with anything right now. There’s a debt crisis, prices of everything and inflation have gone up dramatically. People’s lives and situations go from bad to worse. Their willingness to stay quiet has disappeared. You’re more likely to hear about the discontent openly in the streets,” Egyptian-Canadian journalist Karim Zidan said to me days after he arrived in Cairo for a visit last month.

In an entitled “Egypt’s Sisi Rules by Fear—and Is Ruled by It,” Egypt expert Steven A. Cook added, “There is a large, growing, and noticeable divergence between what the government promises Egyptians and how they experience everyday life.”

Fear of renewed protests in Egypt, set to become the world’s largest importer of wheat for the fiscal year 2023–2024, was likely one reason why the Abu Dhabi Export Office and UAE-based agribusiness Al Dahra last month to provide Egypt for the next five years with $100 million a year worth of imported milled wheat “at competitive prices.”

Fear of unrest drives harsh repression

The fear of protests, even in countries like Saudi Arabia with a low risk of discontent spilling into the streets, may also explain out-of-proportion repressive measures like the kingdom’s recent of Muhammad al-Ghamdi, a 54-year-old teacher and brother of a dissident Islamist scholar, for his activity on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Human Rights Watch said the two X accounts associated with al-Ghamdi and cited in court documents had only ten followers between them. Al-Ghamdi generally retweeted tweets by known critics of the Saudi government.

In a just-published , author Robert D. Kaplan noted that Vladimir Lenin, a founder of the Soviet Union, understood “that it was necessary to murder and incarcerate the innocent. For how else could a dictator inculcate total fear in the population? To punish only the guilty would provide the innocent, who constitute most of the population, with peace of mind. And that, of course, would undermine the sort of control that Lenin believed was necessary.“

Kaplan’s analysis bears out in Iran’s response to protests and Israel’s West Bank and Gaza-related policies. Moreover, it doesn’t bode well for Syrian protesters. Even so, the analysis provides an explanation for Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s unnecessarily harsh repression of any sign of dissent.

However, what protests in countries like Iran and Syria and powder kegs such as Egypt suggest, as did the 1989 anti-government demonstrations that sparked the demise of the Leninist empire, is that repression at best buys autocrats and authoritarians time. In the end, it doesn’t remove the risk of mounting discontent with social and economic policies spilling onto the streets.

[ first published this piece.]

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Three years on after the end of its latest civil war, Libya’s political elites have once again led the country down a path of executive bifurcation. This is fuelling instability and violence. Last summer, young Libyans took to the streets cross-country in a show of raw popular frustration. In a country with two governments no one really governs it. 

Libya has stumbled into another year with no prospect of elections in sight. Libya’s political and security elites, and their foreign backers continue to benefit from the country’s deep divides. They have entrenched themselves in their positions of power. They are using their financial and political resources to prevent any change to the status quo and any process of democratic transition. They are functioning as per a mafia ethos that has been seen in many places in the world where criminal syndicates rule their communities.

Armed  Groups and their Fiefdoms

In Libya, “those who shall not be named’ now rule the land and their criminal ways are now a political reality. Any discussion of Libya’s future must recognize these mafia powers and deal with them. 

Since the revolution that led to the fall of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, armed groups have taken over what’s left of the Libyan state. They exercise traditionally Weberian sovereignty over their fiefdoms. Most key armed groups commanders have since taken up positions within the state apparatus, progressively deriving political legitimacy from their institutional affiliations and securing roles for their rank and file. With institutional affiliations and state salaries came an increase in warlords’ individual influence, making it difficult for weak state structures to oversee, control and hold them accountable. 

As per some estimates, almost one in five Libyans is now drawing a salary from the state, including in their capacity as members of an armed group. However, the state has often been unable to pay salaries for months at a time. This has drawn people away from the golden standard of state employment towards the star-glazed life of the militiaman. This vicious cycle of rushing towards gold is very emblematic of armed groups’ elite commanders who are more focused on mobilizing financial resources than on fighting.

As armed groups increasingly infiltrate the political and military tracks of the UN-led peace process, it seems that, in the future, Libya will be a mafia-run state. 

What lies ahead?

There is a chance that political legitimacy could cause the downfall of armed groups as organized criminal networks. As they increasingly draw legitimacy and resources from the state, their social legitimacy could decline. The Libyan population is increasingly disenchanted with the entire political class. 

The time has come for the international community to step in and find a framework for the expression of Libyan people’s democratic yearnings. This might involve more of a policing approach instead of accepting the inclusion of armed groups in peace negotiations. Libya needs a new paradigm, not more sticking plaster to paper over the cracks.

Sadly, we cannot expect this paradigm shift in the short term. The appointment of UN Envoy Abdoulaye Bathily is a moment of opportunity for Libya. Yet the presented at the UN Security Council in February 2023 centered around creating a body to hold elections and failed to address deeper issues. Bathily is burdened by legacies of conflicts that were undealt with. The UN process paid little heed to justice, restitution and the broader Libyan public. Now the public is growing impoverished, fatigued and apathetic, and has come to distrust the UN mission. 

For now, criminal networks are protecting their positions of power. They are also leveraging the shadow economy to enrich themselves. In Libya, the social contract still fundamentally comes down to economic interest. So, a corruption-prone government spends billions of Libyan dinars with no clear process, checks or balances. 

Libya has the potential to be an economic hub for the whole of North Africa and a bridge to Europe, notably during a global energy crisis. Yet, there is little governance of the disbursement of state funds with over 40 billion Libyan dinars in cash moving around the country unchecked. In the east, an Egyptian style of military involvement in the economy, notably through the Military Investment and Public Works Committee, creates dangerous precedents for the worsening of an already precarious economic governance system. 

More dangerously, in the medium to long term, criminal networks are eyeing funds of the National Oil Corporation, which should be used for infrastructure development instead. The UN’s narrative of “Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration” (DDR) has degenerated into a trope used only by the security assistance industry. It has no prospects of success against the militias’ “core” management structure that yields such wealth and power that even key private sector positions wouldn’t be attractive enough to trigger a willing change in their path.

This bleak picture is but the tip of the iceberg. Organized crime of this scale now scuppers prospects for development in Libya. Ethical questions should be at the front and center of this discussion about the international community’s modus operandi: What does it mean to have normalized having an armed 13-year-old boy manning a checkpoint? Why are Libya’s young boys so drawn to weapons and money? 

Substance abuse is now rampant in the country. Given the long-term psychological effects of war and death, forced recruitments into security forces from a young age, and no perspectives for one’s future in any other field, is that surprising? 

As of now, no end is in sight. Self-interest of criminal militia leaders is still the driving force for the maintenance of the status quo. They are key spoilers who block any political solution that would make them lose power, privilege, influence and wealth.

There are still some avenues for hope, still. The top management of criminal militias do not have incentives to change. However, their rank and file could be tempted to change tack if they had other opportunities. Investments in education and developing a private sector would be a good starting point. If Libya could emerge as an energy hub, then militia foot soldiers might move to lower risk careers.

A UN-led focus on justice, reconciliation and accountability would help as well. So, would better oversight as well as checks and balances on government spending. Cracking down on corruption and financial mismanagement would give the Libyan government more money to invest on education and infrastructure. Finally, the public’s disenchantment with the UN process, political elites and self-interested militia commanders could be a great opportunity for the country. The Libyan people could come together to draft a new social contract inspired by their values that fulfills their quest for justice and accountability.[ first published this piece.]

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Worse still, the moribund process was the perfect environment for a renegade military officer, Khalifa Haftar, to transform a counterterror operation into a Libyan forever war that saw him promoted to general — then field marshal — in a five-year journey of over 2,000 kilometers from eastern Libya to the gates of Tripoli.

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It was an internationally-driven campaign that ended with Libya’s domestic bifurcation replicating itself internationally. By June 2020, with Haftar’s�� and army in tatters, Turkey dominated western Libya, whilst Russia adeptly controlled the east and all that the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and France had once hopefully built for their marshal. Yet this war, and the international dynamics around it, had supercharged Libya’s drivers of destabilization and the largely clandestine proxy war threatened to explode into direct regional conflict.

The Political Process in Libya

So, when the  to pick up Libya’s much-abused political process once more, there was relief from many. However, the UN failed to learn from its mistakes of just five years ago and so built a process that may not be an exact repeat of what came before but which certainly rhymed with it.

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It was a process that promised elections in December 2021 and relied upon the same politicians who had divided the country in 2015 to first reunify it and then prepare the elections that would remove themselves from office. In an extension of that same wisdom, the process also re-empowered Haftar — the defeated megalomaniac who had attacked Libya’s capital in 2019 — and gave him a driver’s seat for building a unified national military. Overseeing it all was a man, Abdul Hamid Dbeibah, who had gamed the UN process by paying�� of euros in bribes��to those Libyans taking part in it to become the prime minister of Libya’s new government of national unity (GNU).

Given the framing of this process, it is perhaps not such a surprise that, eight months later, there is little substantive progress toward elections, while each of the main actors are more firmly rooted in their positions.

Aguila Saleh, the speaker of Libya’s parliament and perhaps the most influential of the remaining political class, has given everything to block progress toward elections, whilst working to reverse what little unification took place after the formation of Dbeibah’s unity government. He has used his role as speaker to continuously postpone what were necessary and urgent discussions on the constitutional basis for elections — i.e., what the Libyan people would exactly be voting for at the end of the year.

This forced the discussion out from parliament to the UN convened body, which had first authorized this new process. However, with all political players having significant influence over that body and the newest UN special envoy, Jan Kubis, being notable only for his anonymity in the role, these discussions were quickly sidetracked to irrelevance.

Instead, Saleh worked on extorting the GNU to guarantee a swollen budget for him to build out a patronage network across eastern Libya and develop bilateral relations with countries like Greece and Egypt, providing them access to public tenders in the east. As such, despite the presence of a unity government, Libya is perhaps more divided today than it was 12 months ago when parallel governments existed — as Saleh acts as a de-facto prime minister of the east.

However, during a recent interview with��ers, Saleh shirked all responsibility for the failure to make progress on elections. Instead, he publicly blamed the GNU, claiming that Prime Minister Dbeibah had betrayed the UN process and, as a result, he would be forced to reappoint an eastern government. This is a convenient outcome for Saleh, who has used the process to grab further power and funding for himself, which he will now lock-in by refreezing the political transition and any political process with western Libya and its actual government.

The Field Marshall

Haftar has supported him toward that end. The UN process brought the warlord time and space to reconstitute what he could of his forces, while Russia and the UAE provided him with mercenaries to buttress his position and allow him to repair his branding. His new-look army still claims to be Libya’s national military and claims parliamentary support for that distinction. However, the groups responsible for local security across east and south Libya no longer follow his orders and unilaterally pursue their own interests, rendering his control nominal.

Instead, Haftar has focused on maintaining political credentials and growing his economic activity. His “military investment authority” has started their own construction projects using Emirati����to allegedly break ground on three new cities in eastern Libya with a promised capacity of 12 million people — a real boon to the tired and impoverished country of 6 million. His sons continue to dominate smuggling operations throughout Libya even as their father postures as he prepares to run for president.

Haftar and the media machines provided by his foreign backers have focused on a narrative that Libya’s UN-promised elections are only to be presidential elections, and any attempts to create a more complex electoral process or constitutional framing than that would be to violate the people’s freedom of choice. Saleh has supported this, posturing as a democrat, knowing that a president would not affect his parliament.

Moreover, both men know that this gambit is a sure winner. Elections will either be forced, with Haftar using armed groups to fix the vote to become an all-powerful president or, more likely, a majority of the country will refute the notion of allowing someone who bears significant command responsibility for war crimes and the killings of thousands of Libyans over the past five years. Then he can leverage his position supporting elections to regain international legitimacy, put the blame on western Libya and work with Saleh toward an eastern government he controls.

Such is the disingenuity of Saleh and Haftar that Dbeibah never even had to try to postpone elections, although most of Libya knew his intention is to be there for the long haul. He has played off the stalling tactics of the other two and their direct hostility to try to build a policy around gathering international support to help his government settle, rebuild and return essential services, plan a proper constitutional basis, unify the military and only then — sometime in the future — allow for elections. The financial promise of this rebuilding enterprise has brought him the support of key players in addition to just Turkey, with whom he remains close.

Libya’s Future

As Libya’s process hurtles toward its expected collapse, the shape of its future will look familiar to anyone watching the country: re-division, disingenuous political bickering between those who never had an interest in governing, quiet cooperation between those bickering when it comes to corruption, and the ever-worrying threat of renewed conflict as Haftar awaits a new opportunity to seize power and other armed groups contest the depleted legitimacy of those in charge and look for a route of their own into the government coffers.

Meanwhile, it is the Libyan people, as always, who suffer as their essential services continue to collapse, their wealth disappears and the soaring temperatures of a warming world begin to make everything that bit more volatile.

*[This article was originally published by��, a partner organization of .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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On March 10, Dbeibeh presented his cabinet to members of parliament and won the confidence of 132 deputies out of the 133 who attended the session in Sirte. The internationally recognized national unity government based in Tobruk was subsequently in, but it faces many challenges. These include political, military, economic, and social and human rights issues.

Political Challenges

Dbeibeh is a businessman-turned-politician from Misrata, a port city that is around 200 kilometers to the east of Tripoli, the Libyan capital. During his time in business, he was involved in political circles as a trusted person of the ruling Arab Socialist Union. In 2007, Muammar Gaddafi, the ruler of Libya at the time, charged Dbeibeh with the task of running the state-owned Libyan Investment and Development Company (LIDCO). The firm was responsible for some of the country’s biggest public works projects. After the Libyan revolution of 2011, which led to the overthrow and subsequent death of Gaddafi, the Libya al-Mustakbal (Libya Future) movement was founded by Dbeibeh.

The prime minister has succeeded in forming a broad-based coalition government that has brought together representatives of most stakeholders from the political, regional and tribal scenes in Libya. Dbeibeh crystallized a state of relative consensus between the different parties that have lived during a state of dissonance and a raging power struggle. This culminated in Major General Khalifa Haftar’s of war on Tripoli in April 2019. Haftar’s heavy losses, his failed coup against civilian rule, the suffering of Libyans from war and their forced displacement pushed the bickering parties to negotiate and reach a political agreement. This deal was endorsed by the United Nations mission, under the pressure of countries such as the United States, Germany, Britain and Italy. The formation of the new Libyan government is based on a fragile consensus dictated by necessity. The sustainability of this is a challenge in itself, requiring a high degree of governmental harmony and solidarity.

Dbeibeh’s team now faces the challenge of bridging the gap between the various actors on Libya’s political scene and bringing them together under a single banner. This national project entails the extension of state sovereignty over the whole of Libyan territory and the consolidation of civil peace, taking into account public interest. The new government is also required to implement the drawn up by the LPDF. Most importantly, this includes the unification of sovereign institutions to elect new leaders to manage the transitional phase. It also involves creating conditions for organizing legislative and presidential elections at the end of the year.

The formation of the national unity government represented a historic moment that was the result of talks between the most prominent political actors in Libya. It served as a political solution to the Libyan crisis and a transition from a situation of war to one of peace.

Despite the peaceful transition of power from Fayez al-Sarraj, the prime minister under the Government of National Accord (GNA), to Dbeibeh, some political figures have not fully grasped the scope of change taking place in Libya. Instead, they have resisted the shifts in government to preserve their influence and personal and factional interests.

An example of this is the case of Aguila Saleh Issa, the speaker of parliament and president of the House of Representatives (HOR). Issa was expected to vacate his role, as decided by the forum, to allow a new figure from the south to be head of the legislative body. The aim is to create a balance between the different regions of Libya. Yet the speaker has clung on to his position.

Issa has a long history of obstructing the path for a peaceful settlement to the Libyan crisis. In 2016, the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctions against him. He was accused of being “complicit in, actions or policies that obstruct, undermine, delay, or impede, or pose a significant risk of obstructing, undermining, delaying, or impeding, the adoption of or political transition to the GNA.” In addition to this, parliament remained divided and suspended during his term and only met on rare occasions.

Military Challenges

On the military front, the UN Security Council has called on all parties to abide by the agreed in Geneva under the UN in October 2020. Yet in March this year, a UN report that the arms embargo in Libya is “totally ineffective.” The Geneva agreement a 90-day deadline for foreign mercenaries to leave the country. The stated period has since passed, but Libya is still teeming with local and international armed groups.

This complex situation poses a major challenge to the national unity government. Officials are primarily concerned with forcing all parties to respect the ceasefire and stop the imports of weapons by land, sea and air. In addition to this, millions of weapons — or stolen — are handled illegally in Libya.

The state needs to regain its authority and have a monopoly on the use of weapons. This requires forcing the armed brigades in the east and west to hand over their equipment to the Ministries of Defense and Interior. This approach calls for dissolving Libyan militias, draining their sources of funding, rehabilitating their members and reintegrating them into official security and defense structures. This includes institutions such as the police, army, civil protection or border control, which have specific laws and codes of conduct and a clear hierarchy subject to civilian leadership.

The government will likely face resistance from armed groups. The brigades loyal to General Haftar, who considers himself above the state and does not accept the command of civilian leadership, will present a particular challenge.

Mercenaries also pose a risk. There are an 20,000 foreign fighters in Libya, according to former UN Envoy Stephanie Williams. Most of them are stationed in the east of Libya and in the oil crescent, a coastal area that hosts most of the country’s oil export terminals. The fighters include Sudanese, Chadian, Syrian and nationals earning high salaries.

Their deportation presents a further challenge because the groups are part of a network of power relations other countries. Russia, Turkey, Egypt and France have used fighters and technical experts as bargaining chips to ensure their share of reconstruction projects and natural resources in Libya. The Libyan government needs to create a situation where locals reject the presence of mercenaries and put pressure on them to leave.

The support of the European Union, the United States and Britain is also important. Such global powers must intensify diplomatic and field efforts on these armed groups to surrender their positions and weapons to the Libyan government. If this can be achieved in a manner that guarantees the sustainability of peace and stability, foreign investors might view Libya as a safe country for commercial and economic activity.

Economic, Social and Human Rights Challenges

The Dbeibeh government has inherited an economy that has been weakened by war and financial and administrative corruption. The economy has been severely affected by the deliberate halting of oil production and export by and militias loyal to Haftar. It has also been impacted by depleted parallel institutions and informal trade as well as the smuggling of fuel and other basic materials. “Due to the closure of oil wells and restrictions put by pro-Haftar armed groups, the Libyan economy suffered a loss of $5 billion in January 2020,” Mucahit Aydemir . “From 2016-2019, the country has already lost more than $100 billion, as Ibrahim Cadran, an Haftar ally interrupted the oil excavation in the east of the country.”

It is assumed that the national unity government will set an audited public budget and liberate oil fields from foreign, tribal or militia domination. The interim leaders should also seek to restore the export of oil, the country’s primary source of income. Undertaking these urgent, necessary reforms will allow the provision of cash liquidity, secure salaries and help the Libyan dinar (LD) recover, if only relatively. According to the World Bank, the dinar “continues to suffer in the parallel market because of political uncertainties and macroeconomic instability. In the first two quarters of 2020, the LD in the parallel market lost 54 percent of its value.”

On the social and human rights front, it is imperative for the new government to provide citizens with essential services, such as clean water, electricity, gas, medicine and basic foodstuffs, and to fight the wastage of public money and increasing prices. In March, UN Special Envoy Jan Kubis said the “country is facing an acute electricity crisis this summer and there are risks to its water security as well.” He added that “UN agencies estimate that over 4 million people, including 1.5 million children, may face being denied access to clean water and sanitation if immediate solutions are not found and implemented.”

In addition, the coronavirus was confirmed to have spread to Libya on March 24, 2020, when the first case was reported in Tripoli. Libya is vulnerable to the effects of the pandemic due to the impact of the last civil war, which led to a dire humanitarian situation and the destruction of the country’s . In April, Libya launched its vaccination program against COVID-19, but, as with most countries in Africa, the supplies of doses remain low. At the time of publishing, the country had more than 195,000 infections and over 3,200 deaths.

In light of risks to the country’s health care, an effective strategy must be implemented to combat COVID-19. This must take into account sufficient steps to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, import the necessary number of vaccine doses and guarantee access to health services for those suffering from the COVID-19 disease.

It is also important for authorities to release political prisoners, deal with cases of enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings and end for those committing crimes. Those forcibly displaced during the civil war must also be allowed to return to their homes and resume their professional lives in a safe environment. The building blocks for a project of transitional justice as a prelude to a practical, inclusive and fair system of reconciliation must also be pursued.

The time available to the Dbeibeh government is limited and the challenges it faces are plenty. But this should not prevent the interim administration from being able to introduce changes and pave the way for political, economic and human rights reform. However, this will be possible only if officials are united and cooperate to serve the public and if international support continues for the national unity government. Most importantly, to succeed, the government will need the support of Libyans themselves.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Internationalized Conflict

International interference in Libya has only grown over the past year and has further entrenched hostilities. The LNA has benefited from Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan and Saudi Arabia’s support in recent years. The incorporation of hundreds of Russian private to its ranks and the continued Russian and support for the LNA and the eastern authorities have significantly increased the Kremlin’s influence in Libya over the past year, while Moscow has officially been calling for a political solution for the conflict.

Turkey Secures a Reprieve in Libya

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Turkey’s overt intervention in Libya with the signature of maritime and security with the GNA in November 2019 brought with it drones, air defense systems and Turkey-aligned Syrian mercenaries. The Turkish support averted the GNA’s collapse and allowed GNA-aligned armed groups to increasingly recapture territory from the LNA in the northwest since March 2020 and put an end to the latter’s offensive. The Turkish and Russian deepening involvement in Libya came amid the declining influence of European powers, particularly France and Italy, in the Libyan theater, while the US has remained skeptical of playing an active role in resolving the conflict.

The increased roles of Turkey and Russia became apparent when, in January, both countries negotiated a , which reduced the intensity of the fighting on the southern outskirts of Tripoli for a few weeks. The Turkish-backed GNA’s recapture of most of northwestern Libya and their ongoing offensive to recapture Sirte will further increase Turkey’s involvement in the North African country, most likely through oil investments and . This will potentially follow the model Turkey adopted in 2017 when it deployed troops to a military base in Qatar following its support for Doha against Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt who began an economic and diplomatic boycott of the emirate in June of the same year.

On its part, Russia is likely to build on its investment in the LNA and the eastern authorities to increase its role as an active player in shaping Libya’s future, most probably through with Turkey. The de-facto division of Libya between the northwest (with significant Turkish and Qatari influence) and the east (with a Russian, Emirati and Egyptian presence) will further deepen the country’s fragmentation.       

Governance and Economic Challenges

Libya’s annus horribilis from April 2019 has further deepened the country’s fragmented governance between the GNA, the Benghazi-based interim government and parliament, and the significantly autonomous local municipal and tribal authorities. The authorities’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic, where the GNA, interim government and local authorities have implemented different curfew and lockdown measures without much coordination, highlight the level of existing fragmentation.

Following almost three years of gradual improvement in the security environment from mid-2016 that allowed oil production to rebound from around 300,000 barrels per day (bpd) in mid-2016 to around 1.2 million bpd by the end of 2019, the belligerent parties over the past year have increasingly weaponized the country’s resources against their opponents. For example, in April 2019, the Tripoli-based central bank imposed on several eastern-based banks’ ability to process foreign currency transactions. In January 2020, LNA-aligned tribes oil export terminals and oil pipelines, triggering a collapse in output from 1.2 million bpd before the blockade to around 90,000 bpd in the following months.

Business Sentiment

Since April 2019, the ongoing conflict has damaged foreign business sentiment toward Libya. Between September 2016 and April 2019, Haftar built much of his international credentials on the fact that his forces secured energy infrastructure in eastern Libya and allowed oil exports to resume, following several years of blockade by the former Petroleum Facilities Guards (PFG) headed by militia leader Ibrahim Jadhran. The LNA’s January 2019 territorial expansion in the southwest was also positively viewed by international oil companies as the LNA-aligned PFGs protecting the giant Sharara and El-Feel oilfields effectively reduced the frequency and intensity of to oil operations in the Murzuq Basin.

Many foreign businesses had benefited from the slowly stabilizing security environment and détente between the GNA and the eastern authorities in 2017-19 to resume their operations in the country. Such a détente and an increase in the state’s flow of revenue from oil sales had allowed the implementation of that stabilized the local currency’s value.  

The resumption of hostilities in April 2019 with the offensive on Tripoli has reversed those gains and led to a decline in business confidence in Libya. This trend has deepened as the conflict broadened in the following months beyond the southern Tripoli frontline and involved airstrikes and mortar shelling across the wider northwest, including against infrastructure facilities such as Tripoli’s Mitiga and Misrata airports.

With the end of the Tripoli offensive, there is an increasing potential, albeit still limited, for a renewed interest from foreign investors, especially in the energy and power sectors, to resume their operations in Libya. However, the conflict situation is fluid and sources of insecurity remain, even in the northwest where the pace of fighting has significantly slowed down in recent weeks. For example, Libya’s southwestern oilfields of Sharara and El-Feel, in the week of June 8, after the forces protecting the fields changed allegiance from the LNA to the GNA. However, shortly after resuming production, forces aligned with the LNA closed the fields again. Separately, on June 10, a local militia group from Zuwara city aligned with the GNA the northwestern Mellitah Oil and Gas Complex, where natural gas is exported to Italy through the Greenstream pipeline, and briefly interrupted the complex’s operations.

Competition over the control of oil installations is likely to increase over the coming months. The LNA remains intent on blockading oil exports to reduce the GNA’s flow of revenue. The GNA has an interest in resuming oil production and exports to reduce the pressure on its finances by expanding its control over oil resources, as the oil sector represents approximately 95% of the country’s exports and 60% of the GDP. However, the GNA’s ability to control the plethora of its affiliated militias to lead a coherent security and policing strategy in the areas it controls is questionable. With the absence of a common enemy in northwestern Libya, represented by the LNA, divisions between the GNA-aligned armed groups are likely to reemerge and compromise efforts to provide adequate security and policing services.  

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Momentous developments across North and East Africa suggest the long-drawn-out process of political transition in the region — as well as the Middle East — is still in its infancy. So too does popular discontent in Syria, despite eight years of war, as well as in Egypt, notwithstanding a 2013 military coup that rolled back the advances of protests in 2011 that toppled President Hosni Mubarak.

What developments across North Africa and the Middle East demonstrate is that the drivers of the 2011 Arab Spring that swept the region and forced the leaders of Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Yemen to resign not only still exist, but constitute black swans that can upset the apple cart at any moment. The situation also suggests that the regional struggle between forces of change and ancien régimes and militaries backed by the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia is far from decided.

Algeria and Sudan

If anything, protesters in and Sudan have learned something from the failed 2011 results: Don’t trust militaries, even if they seemingly align themselves with demonstrators, and don’t surrender the street until protester demands have been met. Distrust of the military has prompted an increasing number of Sudanese protesters to question whether chanting “the people and the army are one” is still appropriate. Slogans as��“freedom, freedom” and “revolution, revolution”��alongside calls on the military to protect the protesters have become more frequent.

The protests in Algeria and Sudan have entered a critical phase in which protesters and militaries — worried that they could be held accountable for decades of economic mismanagement, corruption and repression — are tapping in the dark. With protesters emboldened by their initial successes in forcing leaders to resign, both the demonstrators and the militaries, including�� with close ties to Saudi Arabia��and the UAE, are internally divided about how to proceed. Moreover, neither side has any real experience in managing the crossroads at which they find themselves, while it is dawning on the militaries that their tired playbooks are not producing results.

In a telling sign, Sudan’s interim leader, Abdel Fattah Abdelrahman Burhan, his country’s “special relationship” with Saudi Arabia and the UAE as��he recently met with a Saudi-Emirati delegation��at the military compound in Khartoum, a focal point of the protests. Saudi Arabia has for the protests,��in what many suspect is part of an effort to ensure that Sudan does not become a symbol of the power of popular sovereignty and its ability to defeat autocracy.

Syria

The ultimate outcome of the dramatic developments in Algeria and Sudan and how the parties maneuver is likely to have far-reaching consequences in a region pockmarked by powder kegs ready to explode. Mounting anger as fuel shortages caused by Western sanctions against Syria and Iran bring life to a halt have sparked rare and widespread public criticism of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government. The anger is fueled by that government officials cut in line at petrol stations to fill up their tanks and buy rationed cooking gas and take more than is allowed.

Syria is Here, an anonymous Facebook page that reports on economics in government-controlled areas, took officials to task after state-run television showed the oil minister, Suleiman al-Abbas, touring petrol stations that showed no signs of shortage. “Is it so difficult to be transparent and forward?��Would that undermine anyone’s prestige? We are a country facing sanctions and boycotted. The public knows and is aware,” the Facebook page charged.

The manager of Hashtag Syria, another Facebook page, was arrested when the site��demanded that the oil ministry respond to of anticipated price hikes with comments rather than threats.��The site charged that the ministry was punishing the manager “instead of dealing with the real problem.” Syrian journalist Danny Makki said, “It [Syria] is a pressure cooker.”

Egypt and Libya

Similarly, authorities in Egypt, despite blocking its website, have been unable to stop an online�� against proposed constitutional amendments��that could extend the rule of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi until 2034. The petition, entitled Batel (meaning “void” in Arabic), is, according to — a group that maps web freedom —��one of an estimated 34,000 websites blocked by Egyptian internet providers��in a bid to stymie opposition to the amendments.

President Sisi is a reminder of how far Arab militaries and their Gulf backers are willing to go in defense of their vested interests in a bid to oppose popular sovereignty. Libyan renegade Field Marshall Khalifa Haftar is another. General Haftar’s Libyan National Army (LNA) is attacking the capital Tripoli, the seat of the UN-recognized Libyan government that he and his Emirati, Saudi and Egyptian backers accuse of being dominated by Islamist terrorists.

The three Arab states’ military and financial support of Haftar is but the tip of the iceberg. The general has modeled his control of much of Libya on Sisi’s�� of a military that not only dominates politics, but also the economy. As a result, the LNA is engaged in businesses ranging from waste management, metal scrap and waste export, and agricultural mega projects to the registration of migrant labor workers and control of ports, airports and other infrastructure. The LNA is also eyeing a role in the reconstruction of Benghazi and other war-devastated or underdeveloped regions.

What for now makes 2019 different from 2011 is that both sides of the divide realize that success depends on commitment to be in it for the long haul. Protesters also understand that trust in military assertions of support for the people can be self-defeating. They further grasp that they are up against a regional counterrevolution that has no scruples.

All of that gives today’s protesters a leg up on their counterparts from the Arab Spring of 2011. The jury is out on whether that will prove sufficient to succeed where the people of eight years ago failed.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The American journalist Edward Bernays is often described as the man who invented modern propaganda. The nephew of Sigmund Freud, the pioneer of psychoanalysis, it was Bernays who coined the term “public relations” as a euphemism for spin and its deceptions.

In 1929, he persuaded feminists to promote cigarettes for women by smoking in the New York Easter Parade, behavior then considered outlandish. One feminist, Ruth Booth, declared, “Women! Light another torch of freedom! Fight another sex taboo!”

Bernays’ influence extended far beyond advertising. His greatest success was his role in convincing the American public to join the slaughter of the First World War.��The secret, he said, was “engineering the consent” of people in order to “control and regiment [them] according to our will without their knowing about it.” He described this as “the true ruling power in our society” and called it an “invisible government.”

Today, the invisible government has never been more powerful and less understood. In my career as a journalist and filmmaker, I have never known propaganda to insinuate our lives and as it does now and to go unchallenged.

A Tale of Two Cities

Imagine two cities. Both are under siege by the forces of the government of that country. Both cities are occupied by fanatics who commit terrible atrocities, such as beheading people.

But there is a vital difference. In one siege, the government soldiers are described as liberators by Western reporters embedded with them, who enthusiastically report their battles and air strikes. There are front-page pictures of these heroic soldiers giving a V-sign for victory. There is scant mention of civilian casualties.

In the second city, in another country nearby, almost exactly the same is happening. Government forces are laying siege to a city controlled by the same breed of fanatics.

The difference is that these fanatics are supported, supplied and armed by “us”: the United States and Britain. They even have a media center that is funded by Britain and America.

Another difference is that the government soldiers laying siege to this city are the bad guys, condemned for assaulting and bombing the city, which is exactly what the good soldiers do in the first city.

Confusing? Not really. Such is the basic double standard that is the essence of propaganda. I am referring, of course, to the current siege of the city of Mosul by the government forces of Iraq, who are backed by the United States and Britain and to the siege of Aleppo by the government forces of Syria, backed by Russia. One is good; the other is bad.

What is seldom reported is that both cities would not be occupied by fanatics and ravaged by war if Britain and the United States had not invaded Iraq in 2003. That criminal enterprise was launched on lies strikingly similar to the propaganda that now distorts our understanding of the civil war in Syria.

Without this drumbeat of propaganda dressed up as news, the monstrous Islamic State (IS), al-Qaeda, Jabhat al-Nusra and the rest of the jihadist gang might not exist, and the people of Syria might not be fighting for their lives today.

Vindicated

Some may remember in 2003 a succession of BBC reporters turning to the camera and telling us that Tony Blair was “vindicated” for what turned out to be the crime of the century. US television networks produced the same validation for George W. Bush. Fox News brought on Henry Kissinger to effuse over Colin Powell’s fabrications.

The same year, soon after the invasion, I filmed an interview in Washington with Charles Lewis, the renowned American investigative journalist. I asked him: “What would have happened if the freest media in the world had seriously challenged what turned out to be crude propaganda?”��He replied that if journalists had done their job, “there is a very, very good chance we would not have gone to war in Iraq.”

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It was a shocking statement, and one supported by other famous journalists to whom I put the same question—Dan Rather of CBS, David Rose of The Observer and journalists and producers in the BBC, who wished to remain anonymous.

In other words, had journalists done their job, had they challenged and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children would be alive today, and there would be no IS and no siege of Aleppo or Mosul.

There would have been no atrocity on the London Underground on July 7, 2005.��There would have been no flight of millions of refugees. There would be no miserable camps. When the terrorist attacks happened in Paris in��November 2015, French President Francois Hollande immediately sent planes to bomb Syria and more terrorism followed, predictably—the product of Hollande’s bombast about France being “at war” and “showing no mercy.” That state violence and jihadist violence feed off each other is the truth that no national leader has the courage to speak.

“When the truth is replaced by silence,” said the Soviet dissident Yevtushenko, “the silence is a lie.”

Independence is Intolerable

The attack on Iraq, the attack on Libya, the attack on Syria happened because the leader in each of these countries was not a puppet of the West. The human rights record of a Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi was irrelevant. They did not obey orders and surrender control of their country.

The same fate awaited Slobodan Milosevic once he had refused to sign an “agreement” that demanded the occupation of Serbia and its conversion to a market economy. His people were bombed, and he was prosecuted in The Hague. Independence of this kind is intolerable.

As , it was only when the Syrian President��Bashar al-Assad in 2009 rejected an oil pipeline, running through his country from Qatar to Europe, that he was attacked.

From that moment, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) planned to destroy the government of Syria with jihadist fanatics—the same fanatics currently holding the people of Mosul and eastern Aleppo hostage.

Why is this not news? The former British Foreign Office official Carne Ross, who was responsible for operating sanctions against Iraq, told me: “We would feed journalists factoids of sanitized intelligence, or we would freeze them out. That is how it worked.”

The West’s medieval client, Saudi Arabia, to which the US and Britain sell billions of dollars’ worth of arms, is at present destroying Yemen, a country so poor that in the best of times half the children are malnourished. Look on YouTube and you will see the kind of massive bombs—“our” bombs—that the , and against weddings, and funerals.

The explosions look like small atomic bombs. Those directing the bombs in Saudi Arabia work side-by-side with British officers. This fact is not on the evening news.

Propaganda is most effective when our consent is engineered by those with a fine education— Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Columbia—and with careers on the BBC, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post.

These organizations are known as the liberal media. They present themselves as enlightened, progressive tribunes of the moral zeitgeist. They are anti-racist, pro-feminist and pro-LGBT.

And they love war. While they speak up for feminism, they support rapacious wars that deny the rights of countless women, including the right to life.

In 2011, Libya, then a modern state, was destroyed on the pretext that Gaddafi was about to commit genocide on his own people.��That was the incessant news; and there was no evidence. It was a lie.

In fact, Britain, Europe and the US wanted what they like to call “regime change” in Libya, the biggest oil producer in Africa. Gaddafi’s influence in the continent and, above all, his independence was intolerable.

Ukraine is another media triumph. Respectable liberal newspapers such as The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Guardian, and mainstream broadcasters such as the BBC, NBC, CBS and CNN have played a critical role in conditioning their viewers to accept a new and dangerous cold war.

So he was murdered with a knife in his rear by fanatics, backed by America, Britain and France.��Hillary Clinton cheered his gruesome death for the camera, declaring, “We came, we saw, he died!”

The destruction of Libya was a media triumph. As the war drums were beaten, Jonathan Freedland wrote in The Guardian: “Though the risks are very real, the case for intervention remains strong.” Intervention—what a polite, benign, Guardian word, whose real meaning, for Libya, was death and destruction.

According to its own records, the��, of which more than a third were aimed at civilian targets. They included missiles with uranium warheads. Look at the photographs of the rubble of Misrata and Sirte, and the mass graves identified by the Red Cross. The report on the children killed says, most of them under the age of 10.

As a direct consequence, Sirte became the .

Media Triumph

Ukraine is another media triumph. Respectable liberal newspapers such as The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Guardian, and mainstream broadcasters such as the BBC, NBC, CBS and CNN have played a critical role in conditioning their viewers to accept a new and dangerous cold war.

All have misrepresented events in Ukraine as a malign act by Russia when, in fact, the coup in Ukraine in 2014 was the work of the United States, aided by Germany and NATO. This inversion of reality is so pervasive that Washington’s military intimidation of Russia is not news; it is suppressed behind a smear and scare campaign of the kind I grew up with during the first Cold War. Once again, the Ruskies are coming to get us, led by another Joseph Stalin, whom The Economist depicts as the devil.

The suppression of the truth about Ukraine is one of the most complete news blackouts I can remember. The fascists who engineered the coup in Kiev are the same breed that backed the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Of all the scares about the rise of fascist anti-Semitism in Europe, no leader ever mentions the —except Vladimir Putin, but he does not count.

Many in the Western media have worked hard to present the ethnic Russian-speaking population of Ukraine as outsiders in their own country, as agents of Moscow, almost never as Ukrainians seeking a federation within Ukraine and as Ukrainian citizens resisting a foreign-orchestrated coup against their elected government.

There is almost the joie d’esprit of a class reunion of warmongers. The drum-beaters of The Washington Post inciting war with Russia are the very same editorial writers who published the lie that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.

Threat to the Status Quo

To most of us, the American presidential campaign is a media freak show in which Donald Trump is the arch villain. But Trump is loathed by those with power in the United States for reasons that have little to do with his obnoxious behavior and opinions. To the invisible government in Washington, the unpredictable Trump is an obstacle to America’s design for the 21^st century. This is to maintain the dominance of the United States and to subjugate Russia and, if possible, China.

To the militarists in Washington, the real problem with Trump is that, in his lucid moments, he seems not to want a war with Russia; he wants to talk with the Russian president, not fight him; he says he wants to talk with the president of China.

In the first debate with Hillary Clinton, Trump promised not to be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into a conflict. He said, “I would certainly not do first strike. Once the nuclear alternative happens, it’s over.” That was not news.

Did he really mean it? Who knows? He often contradicts himself. But what is clear is that Trump is considered a serious threat to the status quo maintained by the vast national security machine that runs the United States, regardless of who is in the White House.

The CIA wants him beaten. The Pentagon wants him beaten. The media wants him beaten. Even his own party wants him beaten. He is a threat to the rulers of the world—unlike Clinton who has left no doubt she is prepared to go to war with nuclear-armed Russia and China.

Clinton has the form, as she often boasts. Indeed, her record is proven. As a senator, she backed the bloodbath in Iraq.��When she ran against Barack Obama in 2008, she threatened to “totally obliterate” Iran. As secretary of state, she colluded in the destruction of governments in Libya and , and set in train the baiting of China.

She has now pledged to support a no fly zone in Syria—a direct provocation for war with Russia. Clinton may well become the most dangerous president of the United States in my lifetime—a distinction for which the competition is fierce.

Without a shred of evidence, she has accused Russia of supporting Trump and hacking her emails. Released by WikiLeaks, these emails tell us that what Clinton says in private, in speeches to the rich and powerful, is the opposite of what she says in public.

That is why silencing and threatening Julian Assange is so important. As the editor of WikiLeaks, Assange knows the truth. And let me assure those who are concerned, he is well, and WikiLeaks is operating on all cylinders.

Today, the greatest build-up of American-led forces since World War Two is under way—in the Caucasus and eastern Europe, on the border with Russia, and in Asia and the Pacific, where China is the target.

Keep that in mind when the presidential election circus reaches its finale on November 8. If the winner is Clinton, a Greek chorus of witless commentators will celebrate her coronation as a great step forward for women. None will mention Clinton’s victims: the women of Syria, the women of Iraq, the women of Libya. None will mention the civil defense drills being conducted in Russia.��None will recall Edward Bernays’ “torches of freedom.”

George W. Bush’s press spokesman once called the media “complicit enablers.” Coming from a senior official in an administration whose lies, enabled by the media, caused such suffering, that description is a warning from history.

In 1946, the Nuremberg Tribunal prosecutor said of the German media: “Before every major aggression, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically for the attack. In the propaganda system, it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons.”

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Italy’s postcolonial relations with the Horn of Africa can be summed up as undulant: occasionally on the rise, propelled toward a crest by sporadic government officials’ visits or business deals but, just as often, on the low.

Government policies that��belied pride in Italy’s colonial legacy, rather than regret, certainly damaged relations. So did the fact that Rome had other priorities during most of the Cold War: a commitment to building the European Union (EU), preservation of the transatlantic partnership and the cultivation of ties with Latin American countries with large Italian expatriate communities. The relationship with Africa was woefully neglected.

Besides, even if Rome had made Africa a priority, one wonders how much it would have been able to implement any long-term “redirect” in its focus given its frequent changes in government. Of course, poor leadership in the Horn of Africa, coupled with civil wars engulfing most of the region, played a significant role in precluding closer ties as well.

Turning to Africa

Laudable as it is, the Renzi administration’s announcement of an intention to re-engage with Africa is not unprecedented.

Previous Italian leaders have, from time to time, spoken of a similar reset. Aldo Moro, a Christian Democrat who served as foreign minister before being kidnapped and murdered by the Red Brigades, defied expectations when, as Italy’s diplomat-in-chief, he sought to revive ties with the countries of the Horn. In doing so, he surprised observers who had reputed him as too lazy and too immersed in domestic politics to be an incisive foreign minister. Indeed, on an official visit to Ethiopia, informed that the umpteenth political crisis in Rome had led to the collapse of the government of which he was a cabinet member, he refrained from interrupting his trip and continued his visit, desirous as he was of avoiding any misunderstanding or causing offense.

Another Italian leader who articulated a pro-Africa policy was Bettino Craxi, Italy’s influential socialist prime minister of the 1980s. While speaking at the Constitutive Congress of the International African Socialist in Tunis, Craxi declared: “In every field, when it comes to Africa, we Italians are seriously behind others. Greeted everywhere with affection and respect, we have been late to organize a more effective policy, a more active and widespread presence.” Those words still ring true today, 35 years after they were spoken.

Previous efforts and appeals to re-engage with Africa were seldom met with any follow-through. What reason, then, to treat Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s pronouncements differently?

In this instance, Italy has followed rhetoric with some visible action. Beyond the convening of the first Italy-Africa Ministerial Conference, Renzi has visited Congo-Brazzaville, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria and Senegal. None of his predecessors had ever even made a trip south of the Sahara while in office.

It is also during Renzi’s tenure that Italy has participated in international fora dealing with issues of relevance to Africa at the highest level. At the 2015 United Nations Conference on Financing for Development in Addis Ababa, for example, only two donor states were represented at the head of government level: Sweden and Italy. Of course, it was no coincidence that these two states were also campaigning for a non-permanent United Nations Security Council seat.��Whether these initial gestures will be followed by more sustained measures remains an open question.

Political Longevity

However, Renzi, as opposed to his predecessors, has had the political space to redirect some of his government’s focus to Africa. He has taken advantage of this opportunity.

Italy has had 63 governments over the last 70 years, and four already this decade. Recently, however, legislators have refrained from causing any fracas that��would precipitate the collapse of the Renzi government and a call for elections.

The Renzi government has been in power for two and a half years, far above average by the warped standards of postwar Italy. Cynically—but not without reason—Italians typically point out that legislators’ reluctance to bring the government down is due to a revision of the laws governing certain emoluments or pension payments.

Previously, these would have been owed to members of parliament (MP) irrespective of length of service. Theoretically, under the old system, an MP who had taken up his seat after winning an election, served only one day in parliament before elections were called, and then failed to get reelected, would still be owed certain emoluments. In the early 1990s, the laws were changed to require service of 30 months before MPs were eligible for such emoluments. The laws have since been changed making eventual payment of pension-related emoluments conditional upon an MP serving one full term in parliament.

The Renzi government’s longevity is, of course, attributable to other, arguably more important factors, but it is undeniable that more time in office has given him space to leave his imprint on Italy-Africa relations. Future prime ministers will have the same opportunity if their time in office is similarly long-lived.

Convergence of Interests

As important as the longevity and stability of Italian governments to resuscitating Italy-Africa relations is a convergence of interests between the two sides.

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have been dismal for many years now. Workers’ economic productivity has decreased, while labor costs have remained steady. Unemployment stands at 12%, while youth unemployment remains stubbornly high at 35%. Mind-numbing amounts of red tape make Italy one of the most expensive places in the rich world to start a business. Taking stock of Italy’s sub-par economic performance, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has forecast that unless policymakers aggressively tackle a slew of systemic issues, the seen before the 2008 financial crisis until the mid-2020s, in effect noting that Italy faces two lost decades.

One among several strategies that the Italian government is pursuing in order to promote economic growth is to encourage Italian companies to expand into emerging markets. The government’s interest in nudging Italian investment toward Africa does not appear to be a passing fancy. It is, in part, consistent with the implementation of recommendations contained in a voluminous report authored by the Italian Institute for the Study of International Politics, which was delivered to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The report urges Italy’s economic crisis.

As the world’s eighth largest economy, Italy can play an even larger role in . Both Italy and the African Union (AU) acknowledge that annual trade amounting to €38 billion is far below potential.

As the home to many large internationally competitive corporations, instantly recognizable high-end brands and many successful small and medium-scale enterprises, Italian companies can provide products that��are in demand in African markets with the growing middle classes. But they can also use African countries as a base for production.

Ulterior Motive

An obvious ulterior motive for Italy’s engagement with Africa is migration. It is impossible for Italy to tackle the challenges posed by migration without cooperating with African governments and civil society. Of course, the challenges posed by migration bedevil Europe as a whole, and not only recently.

In 2010, for instance, word leaked of the fact that the EU was contemplating paying Libya’s Muammar Gadaffi €5 billion a year in order, as , to prevent Europe from becoming “black.”

Italy, as a “frontline” state has been particularly active within the EU and international fora on the migration issue. Under plans jointly drawn up by the Italians and European partners, the EU would seek enhanced security at African borders and the right to repatriate migrants without the right to stay in Europe in higher numbers. In exchange, Europe would allow more legal migration. It would also pledge a larger sum than the €1.8 billion offered at the Valletta Summit on Migration. The funds being discussed amount to €10 billion. Predictably, the sticking point is the financing. The Italians have , but the Germans are resolutely opposed.

For African states, the benefits of enhanced cooperation with Italy are self-evident. Although foreign direct investment (FDI) flows last year were up globally by about 40%, they were down overall in Africa by 7% in 2015 when compared to 2014. West and Central Africa fared poorly (18% and 36% respective drops in FDI), East Africa less so (2% decrease in FDI), while southern and northern Africa (2% and 9% in FDI).

This decline in FDI is taking place in a context in which low commodity prices have adversely affected several African economies, who in the aggregate might be headed toward a 17-year low in gross domestic product (GDP) growth. Though not a panacea, Italy can be a source of increased FDI for the continent.

Jostling for Influence

Africa can also reap other strategic dividends in the near and medium term. Consider the European Union’s current state. The EU remains as divided as it ever was post-Maastricht over a plethora of issues, some existential. To mention just a few well-known examples: dissension over how to galvanize a still-anemic continental economy and how best to confront reduced, but still significant, migratory flows.

EU member states also remain unable to achieve the sort of cohesion necessary to formulate truly common foreign and defense policies. With Brussels failing to muster a common voice on these and many other issues, one is reminded of Henry Kissinger’s apocryphal remark: “Who do I call if I want to speak to Europe?”

Given Europe’s current discombobulated state, Africa stands to gain from having as many interlocutors as possible with Brussels. Italy can serve as one such partner. By forging a relationship based on mutual interests, Italy can advocate in favor of more Africa-friendly positions in Brussels. This would not be a negligible contribution to Africa’s interests. After all, EU institutions and EU member states are Africa’s most important source of development assistance.

Beyond Brussels, Italy can help facilitate political dialogue with other countries in the wider Mediterranean, including the Balkans. A more stable Italy—with fewer transient governments—will wield greater political influence commensurate with its economic heft. It can exert such influence with its neighbors and within European institutions.

It is one of those ironies of politics that former colonizers continue to exert undue influence in their now independent former colonies in amounts disproportionate to the influence they wield in the world at large.

In many ways, it has already started to do so. For instance, Italy, together with the US, is taking the lead in conflict resolution in Libya. In the EU, where Italy’s “decision-making power is typically regarded as ‘that of a medium-sized power, not of a big country,’” to have Federica Mogherini appointed to the post of EU commissioner for foreign affairs.

Predictably, Italy will seek to leverage greater stability in other geographic areas as well, Africa included. For historical reasons, perhaps, nowhere more so than in the Horn of Africa. In prior years, Italy offered its good offices in order to mediate the Ethiopian-Eritrean border dispute and Egypt and Ethiopia’s altercation over the latter’s construction of a dam on the Blue Nile. Italy’s efforts to secure an important mediatory role in both cases came to naught.

Italy has also constantly sought to position itself as a player of importance in the Somali peace processes. Here, it has attained more success as reflected, for example, in its selection as chair of the the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD) Partners Forum—a regional organization comprising Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan and Uganda.

Italy’s jostling for influence in the Horn of Africa bears more than just a . It is one of those ironies of politics that former colonizers continue to exert undue influence in their now independent former colonies in amounts disproportionate to the influence they wield in the world at large.

Ultimately, political gestures must almost always be reciprocated with a quid pro quo. If African states see value in Italy interceding on their behalf in Brussels, Rome can reasonably expect to play a larger role in Africa. A more prominent continental role by Italy could be acceptable to African states so long as Rome is neither biased nor overbearing in its mediation efforts.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The vote of no confidence by the eastern parliament, the Tobruk-based House of Representatives (HoR), underscores the fragility and volatility of the current political situation in Libya.

In August 2014, an armed coalition known as Libya Dawn seized the capital Tripoli and set up a parallel administration, forcing the internationally recognized government to flee to Tobruk in the east of the country. In an attempt to resolve the nation’s political and geographic division, in December 2015 the United Nations-brokered Libya Political Agreement (LPA) was announced.

Under the peace plan, the HoR—the internationally recognized parliament—was expected to vote to endorse the unity government. However, a formal vote had been repeatedly prevented by anti-Government of National Accord (GNA) lawmakers, despite the fact that 100 members of parliament (MP) in the HoR signed a pro-GNA petition in February 2016.

No-Confidence Vote in Libya

In the vote of no confidence by the HoR, 61 out of a total 176 MPs voted against the proposed unity government cabinet, while 39 lawmakers abstained and one voted in favor. Despite protests from pro-GNA lawmakers that the vote had not been expected, the numbers were sufficient for a quorum.

Some opposition to the GNA is motivated by the desire to maintain the influence of parallel institutions in the east, and to protect the powerful military general, Khalifa Haftar. Since 2014, Haftar has led a campaign against Islamists and their perceived political allies, which has made him unpopular with supporters of the Libya Dawn forces that captured Tripoli, a coalition that included Islamists and powerful tribes from the wealthy western city of Misrata.

Some in the east are also determined to challenge the growing strength of long-time political rivals in Misrata who have led the GNA offensive against Islamic State (IS) in Sirte and could extend their presence in the strategic oil-rich Sirte basin in central Libya. The presence of the unity government in Tripoli, where pro-Misrata militias are present, is also perceived in the east to leave the Government of National Accord vulnerable to the influence of rival forces.

In the wake of the vote, Prime Minister Fayez Seraj, who heads the nine-member Presidency Council (PC) that acts as Libya’s head of state, said he would form a new cabinet and present it to the HoR for approval. The decision to continue to seek the backing of lawmakers in the east shows that expanding the GNA’s limited authority, which at present extends largely to ministries in Tripoli, depends upon securing the support of competing centers of power. The HoR had voted for the government to submit a new list within eight to 10 days, but the lack of progress in naming new appointees demonstrates how such a timeline was never feasible.

The HoR has also demanded the new cabinet comprise just eight members, down from 17 currently. The smaller cabinet makes it more difficult for the GNA to secure support and represent various interest groups. For example, The Libya Herald reported on August 29 that Musa Koni, a member of the PC, was angered at the lack official posts secured for fellow southerners. The process of replacing the ministers is potentially fraught, as it could expose Seraj and other members of the PC to pressure from different factions, especially those in the east and west, who may struggle to agree on candidates.

The reshuffle itself is likely to undermine the gradual consolidation of power by GNA ministers since the PC arrived in Tripoli in March. Given the extent of opposition to the GNA among some in the east, further challenges to its authority are likely by the HoR and its allies, especially those of General Haftar, who faces an uncertain future if all armed forces are unified under the Presidency Council as called for in the LPA.

The inability of successive Libyan governments since the 2011 revolution to form effective and independent security institutions remains a key driver of the country’s perpetual instability.

Economic challenges in Libya exacerbate political uncertainty

A sustainable improvement to the current security and economic challenges facing Libya requires a resolution the country’s political crisis. High levels of crime and sporadic violence in Tripoli, including frequent��and regular��between rival militias, underscore the limited capacity of the government, which is unable to secure even the capital.

Beyond Tripoli, the unity government remains dependent on alliances with armed groups to exercise authority. The deterioration of public services and the economy has reached critical levels, and if not ameliorated, the GNA could experience an irreparable loss of public support.

Attacks on personnel and infrastructure, as well as unrest at oil ports that lie under the control of militias, have contributed to a precipitous decline in revenues from oil sales, which are at around 15% of 2013 levels, depriving the government of its main source of funds. Underscoring the challenge of restoring lost output, which has been slashed to around 207,000 barrels per day (bpd) from a peak of 1.6 mn bpd, in August state oil company chief Mustafa Sanalla warned that the organization needed up to $1 billion to repair damaged energy infrastructure and to pay tens of millions in arrears to international service companies.

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Currency shortages have made it difficult to secure imports and pay wages, and there is growing anger over power and water cuts, which have worsened since July. These conditions have fueled��and��and led the United Nations envoy to Libya,��,��to warn in August that support for the GNA was “crumbling.” Libya’s divisions have undermined the government response, as evidenced by the decision of eastern officials in June to order bank notes independent of the GNA-backed central bank in Tripoli, a move that officials warned could trigger hyper-inflation.

The Islamic State (IS) has staged repeated attacks on oil fields and ports in the Sirte basin from nearby strongholds, and its territorial losses in the key oil-producing region will only encourage greater competition for control of these strategic resources. There is a precedent for fighting over oil infrastructure in the region between eastern and western forces. In December 2014, pro-HoR fighters repulsed a surprise assault on the Ras Lanuf and Al-Sidr export terminals by the Libya Dawn group, an armed coalition that included Misratan militias and was allied with the now defunct General National Congress.

Receding IS threat may worsen conflict over resources

Diplomatic efforts and joint opposition to the threat from IS largely suppressed fighting between these factions since 2015. However, recent progress in the Misratan-led, GNA approved campaign against IS has been accompanied by an upsurge in belligerent rhetoric and posturing by eastern forces. On��, an official from General Haftar’s Libyan National Army, which is allied with the HoR, warned its forces would secure major oil fields and ports, including Zueitina, Al-Sidr and Ras Lanuf, to protect them.

Many of the ports and fields in eastern Libya are held by the Petroleum Facilities Guards (PFG), a militia allied with the GNA and led by tribal leader Ibrahim Jathran. Both��and Libyan officials have warned of the threat to oil infrastructure from possible fighting, especially near Zueitina where the presence of pro-Haftar forces has been reported.

In June and August, small pro-Haftar forces and the Benghazi Defense Brigades, an anti-Haftar militia that includes Islamists, engaged in small-scale clashes in the vicinity of eastern oil infrastructure, including the��field in Jufrah. An escalation of the conflict for control over Libya’s lucrative energy infrastructure could jeopardize efforts to restore lost output, and undermine political reconciliation efforts.

Foreign powers will continue to constrain the ability of any group outside of the GNA to monetize Libya’s oil revenues by working to prevent exports outside of official channels. However, even with progress in the campaign against IS, Libya’s political institutions will remain too weak and divided to effectively maintain order, thus minimizing the GNA’s ability to capitalize on recent security gains. For example, although the PFG is allied with the GNA, it has led a blockade of oil ports under its control since 2013, and officials from the state-run��have criticized a recent deal to reopen the facilities, warning that the agreement would encourage other groups to target infrastructure in hopes of extracting concessions.

Thus, gains in the conflict against the Islamic State could lead to a resurgence of the unresolved conflict between rival forces in eastern and western Libya, creating fresh political and security challenges for the country’s embattled government. Resolving Libya’s enduring political divisions remains critical to fostering the conditions for a gradual improvement in the economic and security situation in the country.

*[This article is based on a report by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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While the media often focus on cases like , a Pakistani schoolgirl who was shot by the Taliban in 2012, they often forget the many girls and women whose rights and education have been stripped away by Middle East interventions.

For every Malala, there are hundreds of thousands of girls and women whose freedoms and education have been eradicated. From Iraq and Libya to Syria and Yemen, women’s rights have taken a huge setback. In these war-torn countries, women have been subjected to the worst of violence.

Libyan Women

In , when Colonel Muammar Gaddafi took power in 1969, most women were not university-educated. But by the time of his death, more than half of university students were women. To arrive at this point, he passed laws that ensured equal rights for women in pay, education, divorce and property ownership. His work in raising the status of women was even .

Before Gaddafi’s body was even cold, then-Chairman of the National Transitional Council (NTC) Mustafa Abdul Jalil called for the , alienating many of the women who took part in the Libyan Revolution of 2011. Did Libyans die and have their homes burned down just so a man could have four wives?

From then on, things went in a downward spiral. Women have effectively been silenced, some by the barrel of a gun, including prominent activists who supported the NATO-led campaign that ended Gaddafi’s rule, like��, a lawyer and former member of the NTC, who was murdered in her house in Benghazi in June 2014.

Today, many Libyan women have long abandoned the revolution that their sisters gave their lives for. In 2016, five years on, Libya has terrorist groups and tribes running different parts of the country—gangs that have no real roles for women in their versions of a new Libya.

Iraqi Women

was another country where women once enjoyed one of the highest statuses in the Arab world. Many benefitted from great . Women once formed half of the public sector workforce and doctors in the country. However, during Saddam Hussein’s rule, over a decade of United Nations-imposed sanctions—which had a devastating impact on the health and education sectors—weakened their status.

Still, things were not as bad as the turn they took in 2003 following the US-led invasion and occupation. The fall of Saddam gave rise to tribal and extremist groups that interpreted laws according to their own customs and religious rulings.

© Shutterstock

Women have since in employment and , and have seen basic freedoms curtailed due to increased violence from the various groups all competing for power.

In a , Iraqi author and women’s rights activist Zainab Salbi writes: “I grew up in Baghdad with a working mother who drove herself to the office and always told me that I could do anything I wanted with my life. My mother’s friends were factory managers, artists, principals and doctors.

“It has been just over 20 years since I left Iraq. Today, female college students ask me if it is true that the streets of Baghdad were once full of women driving, that women could walk around in public at all times of the day without worry, that university campuses were once filled with women who did not wear headscarves.”

As Iraq struggles with poverty, families are selling their daughters, with reports of . Conditions are even worse in the parts of the country controlled by the (IS), where women are sold in and subjected to unimaginable violence.

Syrian Women

A similar picture is presented in neighboring , where women are faced with .��Women and children make up the . Escaping warzones does not mean an end to violence. There are thousands of Syrian refugee women whose husbands either disappeared or were killed in the conflict. And it is these women who are particularly vulnerable to sexual harassment and exploitation in refugee camps and cities in neighboring countries. Refugee women struggling to make ends meet are often exploited by local men who offer services and financial assistance in .

In Lebanon, high costs have prevented many Syrians from renewing residence permits. A recent��states: “It was very clear to the women we spoke to that the harassment and exploitation they face is made even worse by the fact they have nowhere to turn to for help and protection because they lack valid residence permits.”

Those who remain in Syria are subjected to violence and brutality, particularly in areas controlled by terrorist organizations like the Islamic State and the Nusra Front. In the areas that these militant groups control,����without a male relative, and as most men are fighting or have died, this effectively leaves women locked up indoors.

The wars in the Middle East have caused much destruction and left millions of victims. While most of us find it difficult to see any positive results from these conflicts, it is perhaps easier to identify the worst effects and consequences—and that’s the impact on women and children. The very people we are often told are being saved.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Director Michael Bay’s latest film, 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, has attracted the attention of the Republican Party, who view it as a condemnation of Hillary Clinton’s tenure as US secretary of state and the Obama administration’s handling of a terrorist attack on a on September 11, 2012.

The film depicts an attack by numerous Ansar al-Sharia militants on a US diplomatic compound and, later, a covert Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) annex. Four Americans died during the twin attacks, including US Ambassador Chris Stevens and two former Navy SEALs-turned-CIA military contractors: Glen Doherty (played by Toby Stephens) and Tyrone Woods (played by James Dale).

Jumping on the Movie

Republican presidential hopefuls have encouraged Americans to see the film, believing it will demonstrate Clinton’s incompetence and dent her popularity in the run-up to November’s presidential election. , for example,��told Americans��: “Tomorrow morning a new movie will debut about the incredible bravery of the men fighting for their lives in Benghazi, and the politicians that abandoned them.” even�� to screen the film for free.

Indeed, a number of film critics have dismissed 13 Hours as GOP propaganda, suggesting that its timing before the Iowa Caucus and New Hampshire Primary was a deliberate ploy to increase the selection chances of Democratic candidate , who many Republicans regard as an easier opponent to face in the presidential elections.

There is some evidence to support the GOP’s propaganda thesis. 13 Hours certainly touches on the lack of security measures in place at the diplomatic compound, and the limited government response during the Benghazi attacks, which Republicans have suggested demonstrates the ineptitude of both and the Obama administration.

For example, the CIA military contractors portrayed in 13 Hours often note that the diplomatic outpost is highly insecure and easy to infiltrate, because “Uncle Sam is on a budget.” The film regularly labors the point that the US military failed to provide air support or gunships to assist the contractors during the Benghazi attack. Indeed, a , and an independent panel appointed by the State Department, has confirmed that the US diplomatic outpost in Benghazi was poorly secured.

However, Republicans and those who claim the film is propaganda are missing the point of Michael Bay’s film. 13 Hours is not a criticism of Hillary Clinton or the Democrats, but a criticism of US government in general. The film is much more anti-establishment than it is anti-Obama. 13 Hours is largely an apolitical piece that focuses predominantly on the trials and tribulations of the individual American soldier, the difficulty in maintaining familial relationships during deployment, and the camaraderie that can form between individual soldiers in combat.

More importantly, 13 Hours emphasizes that these soldiers-turned-contractors have been let down by the political establishment and its stifling bureaucracy. While the film depicts a series of events that took place during a Democrat-led administration, the film is devoid of partisan politics, and Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and the Democrats are not mentioned throughout the film.

Furthermore, the film often adopts a critical stance toward the upper echelons of the CIA, and in particular the CIA station chief, who is portrayed as an “East Coast-educated” authoritarian, whose obedience to bureaucratic convention delays the military contractors from leaving the CIA annex in order to save American lives.

In one of the opening scenes, one private contractor belittles an intelligence analyst’s Harvard education because he failed to realize that they were being tailed through the streets of Benghazi by suspected militants. Class dynamics run deep throughout the film, and by juxtaposing the ineffective and, at times, cowardly nature of the CIA analysts against the courageous, pragmatic and humble US soldier, Michael Bay is in many ways criticizing the very demographic of voters who are most likely to vote for the Republican Party.

Another nuance that Republicans have missed is that the film is largely an ode to isolationism, a tenet of US foreign policy that favors military restraint over military intervention—the latter of which Bay seems to regard as regularly, and unnecessarily, placing US soldiers in harm’s way.

Indeed, John Krasinski, who plays Jack Silva, muses that should he die, his daughters would think that “He died in a place that he didn’t need to be, over something he doesn’t understand, in a country that he didn’t care about.” At one point 13 Hours even transcends its focus on the plight of the US soldier via a poignant scene in which the mothers, wives and children of the Libyan militants killed during the attack mourn the loss of their loved ones.

It seems that Bay is suggesting that even the enemy’s death is a tragic consequence of US interventionism—and is avoidable. It is in this sense that Republican candidates have largely missed the film’s point. Most of the Republican presidential candidates are “hawkish” in nature and believe in the creation and maintenance of a strong US military, capable of exerting its influence within the international system. Indeed, a number of Republican candidates, including��Donald Trump, support the notion of deploying ground troops to fight Daesh (Islamic State) in Syria and Iraq. The very type of interventionism that Bay’s film is criticizing suggests that this policy is harming US soldiers.

Bay has insisted that the ,��stating:��“It’s not political. It’s a story of Americans who became heroes.” However, adherents of the GOP propaganda thesis have suggested that Bay has misrepresented the facts regarding the US military’s failure to provide air support, in order to damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Multiple that the nearest F-16’s in Aviano Air Base, Italy, were not combat ready, as they were trainers and would have taken 20 hours to reconfigure and prepare for combat. However, Bay omits these particularities, which might leave the viewer thinking the US military establishment was particularly neglectful and inept in its handling of the Benghazi attacks.

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton / Flickr

However, this is more likely to be a case of Bay exercising some “artistic license” rather than a partisan attack on Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration. Bay’s cinematic style is often fast-paced, favoring action shots over technical dialogue. Bay’s decision to leave out these details is most probably a reflection of this tendency, rather than a deliberate partisan attack.

Will 13 Hours affect Clinton’s campaign?

13 Hours will not harm Clinton’s campaign, but the politicization of the film might. The movie is not a piece of GOP propaganda, but the Republican Party and American conservative media seem to believe it is. Fox News, for example, has spent numerous��, including a special broadcast devoted to the film. Republicans are mobilizing this film in order to resurrect the controversy surrounding the Benghazi attacks, and to reinsert the idea that the Benghazi attacks were mishandled by the Obama administration and Clinton, into the national political conversation.

Those who watch the film having listened to Republican rhetoric are likely to view it through a politicized and partisan lens that was never supposed to be there. Whereas the uninformed viewer is unlikely to leave the film with any hard feelings toward Hillary Clinton or the Obama administration, but more toward government in general and an interventionist foreign policy that needlessly endangers US soldiers.

However, despite the Republican Party’s largely successful politicization of the film, there are a couple of reasons to believe that 13 Hours will have negligible consequences on the presidential election. First, the film has had limited successes, grossing just $16 million in its opening weekend. And, as of February 11, the film has , meaning that it is likely to go unnoticed by the majority of Americans. Second, being a war film that focuses largely on soldierly heroism and that celebrates US militarism, it is likely that the key demographic watching the movie is already predisposed to voting Republican.

Indeed, Paramount Studios, the production company behind 13 Hours, has been deliberately promoting the film to the conservative crowd, with the film premier����in Republican stronghold, Dallas, Texas.

13 Hours is unlikely to impact the US presidential election, and Republican efforts to make the film political are more a sign of genuine concern about Hillary Clinton’s presidential chances than anything else.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has alleged that “of course” the ��if dictators like Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi were still around, or if Bashar al-Assad could be restored in Syria.

The mistake Trump is making is to think ahistorically—that is, to think as though societies do not change dramatically over time. Neoconservatives thought they could install a king over Iraq in 2003. But Iraqi society had overthrown the kings in 1958, and there is no going back. History may not be dialectical in exactly the Hegelian sense, but any historical situation does produce other, different situations over time.

Moreover, societies can change dramatically. History is not static. It is not like a slab of marble. Historical developments produce new and different historical situations over time, and new generations react to the previous ones by striking out in different direction, even at great risk.

Syria, Iraq and Libya

How anyone in his right mind could think that Bashar al-Assad brought��stability��to Syria just baffles me. He provoked the 2011 uprisings, and he caused the civil war by deploying his military against the peaceful demonstrators. That’s stability? It is mostly his fault that over 200,000 Syrians are dead and 11 million out of 22 million are homeless. If you are president and your country is in this condition, you don’t get to say you brought stability. Nor is the problem outsiders. In 2011, there was almost no outside interference in Syria. Assad drove the opposition to pick up arms. The largely rural and illiterate Syria of 1970 when Assad’s father came to power is long gone. You can’t keep them on the farm once they have seen gay Paree.

Iraq was anything but stable under Saddam Hussein. The country invaded two neighbors, Iran and Kuwait, in wars that killed perhaps a million Iraqis out of then 16 million. Thousands were bulldozed into mass graves for belonging to opposition parties. Does this sound stable to you? That the regime would have survived in the long-term is highly unlikely. I did and do think the US invasion of Iraq was a huge mistake. (In early 2003, I compared the idea to that scene in Star Wars where they are in the trash compactor and it starts to move, and Harrison Ford says, “I have a bad feeling about this.”) But that is because the war violated international law and brought absolute chaos to Iraq, not because the existing government was “stable” or good for the locals.

Muammar Gaddafi’s police state was unstable all along, but survived because of repression. By 2011, it was no longer surviving because society had changed. In 1969, Libya was largely rural and illiterate. In 2011, it was largely urban and literate. In 1969, most people did not have telephones. In 2011, most people had cellphones. When Gaddafi cut off the Internet, people just sent videos and messages by SMS on their phones.

People were what Karl Deutsch called “socially mobilized” (urban, literate, connected by communications networks). Being socially mobilized is no guarantee of being politically mobilized. Lots of socially mobilized societies are politically quiescent. But in 2011, people in Libya became politically mobilized, and their high degree of social mobilization was a real asset in making the revolution. The NATO intervention mainly leveled the playing field for the rebels by destroying regime arms depots out in the desert or targeting SCUD and tank convoys.

Libya under Gaddafi was not stable by 2011, and it was not the United Nations no-fly zone that made it unstable. It was unstable because Gaddafi’s secret police state had lost its authority for a majority of the population, which rose up against it. That is clear instability, and it was provoked by Gaddafi’s erratic and sclerotic dictatorship and by massive repression.

I wandered the halls of the courthouse in Benghazi in May 2011, and the walls were full of pitiful old black and white pictures of young men, including soldiers, whom Gaddafi had made to disappear, asking plaintively if anyone knew their fate (we know their fate).

But in the major city of Misrata, for example, the local population defied the tank corps of Khamis Gaddafi for six months and never fell, even though parts of the city were reduced to rubble. Not a single NATO bombing raid was launched in Misrata against the Gaddafi tanks, apparently because the tanks were inside the city and NATO did not want to risk hitting a civilian apartment building.

Those who are confident that the rebels would have been crushed without the intervention should look at the defense of Misrata, which was successful and local, though Gulf RPGs did come in. Without an intervention, Libya would have become Syria.

In the past couple of years, about 3,000 people a year are dying in political violence, which is terrible. But during some years of the last decade, 12,000 people a year were dying of political and .��And Libya hasn’t suffered anything like the death toll of Syria, even if we take into account the disparity in population size.

War Torn Libya

Had Gaddafi not been overthrown (and this was done by the people of Tripoli, Misrata, Zintan and Benghazi, not NATO), Libya would have become exactly like Syria, with 60,000 dead and 3 million homeless (the proportional equivalents of the situation in Syria).

The actual number of internally displaced people in��. That’s awful. It isn’t 50% the country, as it is in Syria, but it is 6%. Removing the Gaddafi regime forestalled the displacement of the 50%, because it is the air force, tanks and heavy artillery that produce that kind of social apocalypse—and the militias in Syria, bad as they are, don’t have that kind of armament.

As of 2011, Gaddafi did not make Libya stable. He made it unstable. Because his rickety 1970s socialist police state could not survive in the modern world. It was modeled to some extent on communist East Germany, which trained his domestic spies—and you will note that the DRG isn’t there any more, either.

Does Donald Trump believe Europe was more stable when Erich Honecker ruled significant swathes of Germany with an iron fist? Or when Tito headed Yugoslavia?

Inflexible dictatorships that cannot adapt to social change and the rise of new generations cause instability, Donald. They don’t forestall it. Or, they don’t forestall it for more than a generation.

*[This article was originally published on Juan Cole’s .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Following the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, Libya has been sporting a rambunctious new democracy that split the country into two warring governments, with militias running large and the rule of law having no real meaning.

In this vacuum, Libya, just a few hundred miles away from the promised shores of Europe, has quickly become a major trafficking hub for those fleeing violence in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and the African continent.

With the official government helpless to control the human trafficking trade, the situation has become so extreme that the European Union has threatened to bomb Libya’s coastline to target the smuggling networks. As a consequence, militias have been contracted to shore up security.

Europe or Die: Libya’s Migrant Trade is a Vice News documentary that traces the journeys made by refugees on their way from the hell of war.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The (EU) is planning to act against human traffickers in the Mediterranean. But the plight of refugees can only be relieved when the EU’s foreign policy engagement is strengthened.

Following the tragedy involving migrants, 28 members and leaders of the EU have initiated plans for a military operation to combat criminal gangs who smuggle refugees in thousands per ship. The details of the initiative still need to be clarified, and the body of water where the operation will cover needs to be decided. This will require ’s permission to destroy the smugglers’ boats in its territorial waters. The EU needs to obtain a mandate in order to operate under Chapter 7 of the United Nations (UN) charter.

Despite these measures that still need to be decided upon, the operation will come into existence, as the pressure on the EU to stop deaths in the Mediterranean is too much to ignore.

The model for the new venture is based on the maritime European Union Naval Force Somalia, or Operation Atalanta, which came into existence in 2008 in order to counter piracy off the coast of and the Gulf of Aden.

As a result of the civil war in Somalia, a lawless space was created that allowed well-armed militias to operate. More and more ships, including some from the UN World Food Programme, which were delivering vital goods to Somalia, have been hijacked in the past. In the first nine months of 2008, ransoms extorted by the pirates reached anywhere from $18-30 million.

Operation Atalanta have succeeded in safely escorting over 300 UN ships to their destinations. In 2013-14, every attack by pirates had been foiled. This was made possible by the fact that the EU deployed 1,200 personnel, four to six vessels and two to three reconnaissance aircraft to patrol an area one and a half times the size of Europe.

However, when looking at these numbers, it must be kept in mind that these results only became visible in 2012, when the number of attacks dropped from 176 to 35. The European Union’s many efforts on land contributed to this development, offering people in Somalia economic prospects and strengthening government structures: EU civilian missions EUTM Somalia and EUCAP Nestor have contributed to education and building up the capacity of the Somali army and naval forces since 2010.

Through its SHARE program, the EU has been softening the humanitarian needs of the population since 2011. The first free elections in 45 years, which led to the establishment of a stable political process in Somalia, were organized by the EU.

In 2010, Brussels realized that the causes of piracy were on land, not water, and that piracy could only be sustainably resolved there. Eventually, a holistic approach led to success.

© Shutterstock

Confront Causes of Migration

The lessons from Operation Atalanta are relevant for the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean. Only an approach that addresses root causes for migration can provide a long-term solution.

This is even more true because the situation in and around the Mediterranean is more complex than in Somalia. Piracy in the Horn of Africa was a result of the dislocations in one country. The failings of the economic system and political structures led to the increased number of Somali pirates.

In contrast, the illegal smuggling of refugees over the Mediterranean, which the future mission in Libya will be directed against, is not a problem that can be solved in the smugglers’ country of origin.

The refugees who are crossing to Europe from Libya come from the wide reaches of the neighboring region: Syria, Eritrea, Mali, Nigeria and Gambia. Migrants are running from war and political prosecution. Destroying the smugglers’ boats will allow the EU to contain the traffickers. But the people will continue to flee to Libya if the root causes of their flight are not addressed. In the meantime, this will only lead to the formation of refugee camps at the gates of Europe.

The use of military force, as well as many other measures that dominate debates — such as the extension of the rescue operation, the revision of the Dublin Asylum System or the easing of the legal migration process — must be integrated into an active and comprehensive foreign policy ������-à-������ the countries of origin of the migrants.

European policy toward its neighbors, cooperation on development and crisis management must be brought closer together. EU member states are not allowed to shirk from getting involved in conflicts such as Syria. The EU has a responsibility to create a peaceful and democratic environment in its neighboring regions. It continues to view itself as a source of peace, but it rarely conforms to this description.

A military operation in the Mediterranean might lessen the pressure on the EU’s outer borders. But the only thing that would help refugees is a comprehensive European foreign policy involvement.

*[This article was originally published in German by ’s content partner, , and it was translated to English by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Nearly four years after NATO-backed rebels toppled , the former Libyan ruler, has plunged into chaotic unrest.

The failure of last year’s election to achieve political unity in Libya was most evident when Fajr Libya, or “Libya Dawn” — a diverse coalition of armed groups that includes an array of Islamist militias — rejected the election’s outcome and����control of Tripoli. The internationally recognized government����to Tobruk, situated in eastern Libya along the Mediterranean coast near the Egyptian border, while Libya Dawn set up a rival government, known as the new General National Congress, in the capital.

As forces aligned with the Tobruk government have fought Libya Dawn, the conflict has gradually become internationalized.��Egypt and the United Arab Emirates��have airstrikes targeting Libya Dawn, while��Turkey, Qatar and Sudan��are to have provided the Islamist-dominated coalition with varying degrees of support.

The emergence of Daesh, or the so-called “,” in strategically vital areas of Libya has further complicated the conflict in Africa’s most oil-rich country, and it has raised security concerns in nearby states.

Libya’s Most Polarizing General

, the mercurial general, has emerged as an influential, yet highly divisive, leader in this bloody conflict. In early March, the anti-Islamist general was����commander of the armed forces loyal to the Tobruk government. Haftar’s role in the former Gaddafi regime, his cozy relationship with Washington and suspicions about his long-term ambitions have given him a controversial reputation among many Libyans. Nonetheless, he is also gaining respect from those who share his vitriol for Islamists.

Haftar was an early Gaddafi loyalist, and he played an��important ��as one of the “Free Officers” in the 1969 revolution that toppled the monarchy led by King Idris al-Sanusi. Gaddafi later����that Haftar “was my son … and I was like his spiritual father.” It was the start of a military career in which Haftar fought on many different sides.

During the Arab-Israeli War of 1973, Haftar����a Libyan battalion. Later, as a commander of Libyan forces in the country’s 1980-87 war with Chad, he was allegedly����for war crimes when his forces were accused of using napalm and poison gas. In 1987, the Chadian military����a major victory in the battle of Wadi al-Doum. In addition to killing more than����Libyan forces, Chad took over����Libyans, including Haftar, as prisoners.

Around that time, Haftar’s loyalties shifted. While held in Chad, he worked with other Libyan officers to coordinate a coup against Gaddafi, before the United States����his release — by����him and 300 of his men to Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) and from there to Virginia.

As a newly minted US citizen, Haftar lived in northern Virginia from 1990-2011, spending part of this time����with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) before returning to Libya in March 2011 to fight once again against the Gaddafi regime. Several sources insist that Haftar was out of the CIA’s hands by 2011, but others maintain that the US government orchestrated his return to Libya that year.

Libya’s Civil War

In 2014, Haftar����for the unilateral dissolution of Libya’s parliament and the establishment of a “presidential committee” to rule the country until new elections were held. He cited Libya’s “upheaval” as justification for the armed forces to take over.

Many saw his act as an attempted military coup aimed at crushing the Muslim Brotherhood, which had�� second place��in Libya’s 2012 elections. Prime Minister Ali Zeidan����his announcement as “ridiculous.”

Although many in Libya’s government viewed him as a rogue general hungry for power, Haftar’s ongoing campaign against Islamist forces has gradually won him supporters. In May 2014, he waged a campaign called “Operation Dignity” to “eliminate extremist terrorist groups” in the country. Since then, the Tobruk-based government has by and large come to support the general, viewing him as the government’s best bet in the struggle against its Islamist enemies.

Haftar’s anti-Islamist crusade parallels that of Egyptian President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi, who is presiding over a crackdown on Egypt’s Islamists. In making no distinction between so-called moderate Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood and hard-line factions such as Daesh and Ansar al-Sharia, which is an al-Qaeda affiliate, Haftar and Sisi are both selling a narrative to the West that their anti-Islamist positions are in sync with the “Global War on Terror.”

So far, Haftar has been unwilling to negotiate with Libya Dawn, which����the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood’s political wing and the “Loyalty to Martyrs” bloc within its coalition. In turn, Libya Dawn refuses to negotiate with Haftar.

The United Nations (UN) has begun hosting talks in Morocco between Libya’s various political factions, in an effort to unite them against the growing threat of Daesh. Unfortunately, the UN’s efforts to push Libya’s two governments toward dialogue is undermined by the low levels of trust between them, and their mutual belief that only through continued armed struggle can they secure more territory and resources. Indeed, with strong backing from Cairo and Abu Dhabi, Haftar is likely convinced that he can make greater gains through warfare than diplomacy.

The toxic legacy of Gaddafi’s divisive and authoritarian regime, which pitted Libya’s diverse factions against one another, has plagued the prospects for any central authority gaining widespread legitimacy in the war-torn country. Indeed, since he was overthrown in 2011, Libya has turned into a cauldron of anarchy, with little meaningful security existing outside of Tripoli and Benghazi.

Gaddafi’s regime harshly oppressed the Islamist groups that went on to form Libya Dawn, which views its rise to power in Tripoli as hard fought and a long time in coming. They view Haftar as a war criminal from the��ancien��regime��committed to their elimination, which will certainly undermine the potential for Libya’s two governments to reach a meaningful power-sharing agreement. With no peace in sight, a continuation of the bloody stalemate between the Tobruk- and Tripoli-based governments seems most likely.

International Implications of Libya’s Turmoil

The fall of Gaddafi launched a�� tsunami��across Africa and into the Middle East. Libya is now home to the world’s largest loose arms cache, and its porous borders are routinely transited by a host of heavily armed non-state actors — including the Tuareg separatists and jihadists who forced Mali’s national military from Timbuktu and Gao in March 2012 with��newly acquired from Libya. The UN has also the flow of arms from Libya into��Egypt,��Gaza,��Niger,�� and��Syria.

Last October,����fighters loyal to Daesh seized control of Derna near the Egyptian border, some 200 miles from the European Union. Since then, �ٲ������’s Libyan branch has taken ��of Sirte and�� a degree of influence��in Benghazi, the nation’s second largest city and heart of the 2011 uprising against Gaddafi.

The group’s use of Libyan territory to terrorize and threaten other states has raised the international stakes. In February, Daesh��beheaded��21 migrant workers from Egypt because they were Coptic Christians, and then it��released��a propaganda video containing footage of the heinous act. That lured Egypt into��waging��direct airstrikes against the group’s targets in Derna.

Last November, Ansar Bait al-Maqdis — the dominant jihadist group in the Egyptian Sinai —����allegiance to Daesh, as did Nigeria’s��Boko Haram��more recently. Daesh has also made��direct threats��against Italy,����officials in Rome to warn that Italy’s military may intervene in Libya to counter Daesh fighters.

One-quarter��of �ٲ������’s fighters in Derna from other Arab countries and Afghanistan. A major����of Jabhat al-Nusra fighters from Syria have also entered the fray in Libya, underscoring how Islamist extremists from lands far away have exploited Libya’s status as a failed state. This development was most recently underscored when a Sudanese member of �ٲ������’s Libya division�� out��a suicide attack on April 5, which targeted a security checkpoint near Misrata. The bloody incident resulted in four deaths and over 20 injuries.

The number of weak or failing states across Africa suggests that such international networks will continue to take advantage of frail central authorities and lawlessness throughout the extremely underdeveloped Sahel and other areas of the continent to spread their influence. In the absence of any political resolution to its civil war, Libya in particular — as a failed state with mountainous oil reserves — will remain vulnerable to extremist forces hoping to seize power amidst the ongoing morass.

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The recent 70^th anniversary of the liberation of was a reminder of the great crime of fascism, whose iconography is embedded in our consciousness. Fascism is preserved as history, as flickering footage of goose-stepping blackshirts, their criminality terrible and clear. Yet in the same liberal societies, whose war-making elites urge us never to forget, the accelerating danger of a modern kind of fascism is suppressed; for it is their fascism.

“To initiate a war of aggression,” said the Nuremberg Tribunal judges in 1946, “is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

Had the Nazis not invaded Europe, Auschwitz and the would not have happened. Had the United States and its satellites not initiated their war of aggression in in 2003, almost a million people would be alive today; and the , or ISIS, would not have us in thrall to its savagery. They are the progeny of modern fascism, weaned by the bombs, bloodbaths and lies that are the surreal theater known as news.

The Libyan War

Like the fascism of the 1930s and 1940s, big lies are delivered with the precision of a metronome: thanks to an omnipresent, repetitive media and its virulent censorship by omission. Take the catastrophe in .

In 2011, launched 9,700 “strike sorties” against Libya, of which more than a third were aimed at civilian targets. Uranium warheads were used; the cities of Misurata and Sirte were carpet-bombed. The Red Cross identified mass graves, and UNICEF reported that “most [of the children killed] were under the age of ten.”

The public sodomizing of the Libyan leader, , with a “rebel” bayonet was greeted by then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with the words: “We came, we saw, he died.” His murder, like the destruction of his country, was justified with a familiar big lie; he was planning “genocide” against his own people. “We knew … that if we waited one more day,” said President , “Benghazi, a city the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.”

This was the fabrication of Islamist militias facing defeat by Libyan government forces. They told Reuters there would be “a real bloodbath, a massacre like we saw in Rwanda.” Reported on March 14, 2011, the lie provided the first spark for NATO’s inferno, described by British Prime Minister as a “humanitarian intervention.”

Secretly supplied and trained by Britain’s SAS, many of the “rebels” would become part of the Islamic State, whose latest video offering shows the beheading of 21 Coptic Christian workers seized in Sirte, the city destroyed on their behalf by NATO bombers.

For Barack Obama, David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy, Gaddafi’s true crime was Libya’s economic independence and his declared intention to stop selling Africa’s greatest oil reserves in US dollars. The petrodollar is a pillar of American imperial power. Gaddafi audaciously planned to underwrite a common African currency backed by gold, establish an all-Africa bank and promote economic union among poor countries with prized resources. Whether or not this would happen, the very notion was intolerable to the United States as it prepared to “enter” Africa and bribe African governments with military “partnerships.”

Muammar Gaddafi © Shutterstock

Following NATO’s attack under cover of a United Nations Security Council resolution, Obama, wrote Garikai Chengu, “confiscated $30 billion from Libya’s Central Bank, which Gaddafi had earmarked for the establishment of an African Central Bank and the African gold backed dinar currency.”

NATO and Kosovo

The “humanitarian war” against Libya drew on a model close to Western liberal hearts, especially in the media. In 1999, Bill Clinton and sent NATO to bomb Serbia because, they lied, the Serbs were committing “genocide” against ethnic Albanians in the secessionist province of . David Scheffer, US ambassador-at-large for war crimes [sic], claimed that as many as “225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59” might have been murdered. Both Clinton and Blair evoked the Holocaust and “the spirit of the Second World War.” The West’s heroic allies were the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), whose criminal record was set aside. The British foreign secretary, Robin Cook, told them to call him any time on his mobile phone.

With the NATO bombing over, and much of Serbia’s infrastructure in ruins, along with schools, hospitals, monasteries and the national TV station, international forensic teams descended upon Kosovo to exhume evidence of the “holocaust.” The FBI failed to find a single mass grave and went home. The Spanish forensic team did the same, its leader angrily denouncing “a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines.” A year later, a United Nations tribunal on Yugoslavia announced the final count of the dead in Kosovo: 2,788. This included combatants on both sides and Serbs and Roma murdered by the KLA. There was no genocide. The “holocaust” was a lie. The NATO attack had been fraudulent.

Behind the lie, there was serious purpose. Yugoslavia was a uniquely independent, multiethnic federation that had stood as a political and economic bridge in the . Most of its utilities and major manufacturing was publicly owned. This was not acceptable to the expanding European community, especially newly united , which had begun a drive east to capture its “natural market” in the Yugoslav provinces of Croatia and Slovenia. By the time the Europeans met at Maastricht in 1991 to lay their plans for the disastrous eurozone, a secret deal had been struck; Germany would recognize Croatia. Yugoslavia was doomed.

Kosovo © Shutterstock

In Washington, the US saw that the struggling Yugoslav economy was denied World Bank loans.�� NATO, then an almost defunct Cold War relic, was reinvented as imperial enforcer. At a 1999 Kosovo “peace” conference in Rambouillet, in France, the Serbs were subjected to the enforcer’s duplicitous tactics. The Rambouillet accord included a secret Annex B, which the US delegation inserted on the last day. This demanded the military occupation of the whole of Yugoslavia — a country with bitter memories of the Nazi occupation — and the implementation of a “free-market economy” and the privatization of all government assets. No sovereign state could sign this. Punishment followed swiftly; NATO bombs fell on a defenseless country. It was the precursor to the catastrophes in Afghanistan and Iraq, Syria and Libya, and Ukraine.

War in Afghanistan

Since 1945, more than a third of the membership of the United Nations — 69 countries — have suffered some or all of the following at the hands of America’s modern fascism. They have been invaded; their governments overthrown; their popular movements suppressed; their elections subverted; their people bombed; their economies stripped of all protection; and their societies subjected to a crippling siege known as “sanctions.” The British historian Mark Curtis estimates the death toll in the millions. In every case, a big lie was deployed.

“Tonight, for the first time since 9/11, our combat mission in is over.” These were opening words of Obama’s 2015 State of the Union address. In fact, some 10,000 troops and 20,000 military contractors (mercenaries) remain in Afghanistan on indefinite assignment. “The longest war in American history is coming to a responsible conclusion,” said Obama. In fact, more civilians were killed in Afghanistan in 2014 than in any year since the UN took records. The majority have been killed — civilians and soldiers — during Obama’s time as president.

The tragedy of Afghanistan rivals the epic crime in Indochina. In his lauded and much quoted , The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the godfather of US policies from Afghanistan to the present day, writes that if America is to control Eurasia and dominate the world, it cannot sustain a popular democracy, because “the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion … Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilisation.” He is right. As WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden have revealed, a surveillance and police state is usurping democracy. In 1976, Brzezinski, then-President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, demonstrated his point by dealing a death blow to Afghanistan’s first and only democracy. Who knows this vital history?

In the 1960s, a popular revolution swept Afghanistan, the poorest country on earth, eventually overthrowing the vestiges of the aristocratic regime in 1978. The People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) formed a government and declared a reform program that included the abolition of feudalism, freedom for all religions, equal rights for women and social justice for the ethnic minorities. More than 13,000 political prisoners were freed and police files publicly burned.

The new government introduced free medical care for the poorest; peonage was abolished, a mass literacy program was launched. For women, the gains were unheard of. By the late 1980s, half the university students were women, and women made up almost half of Afghanistan’s doctors, a third of civil servants and the majority of teachers. “Every girl,” recalled Saira Noorani, a female surgeon, “could go to high school and university. We could go where we wanted and wear what we liked. We used to go to cafes and the cinema to see the latest Indian film on a Friday and listen to the latest music. It all started to go wrong when the mujaheddin started winning. They used to kill teachers and burn schools. We were terrified. It was funny and sad to think these were the people the West supported.”

Afghanistan © Shutterstock

The PDPA government was backed by the Soviet Union, even though, as former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance later admitted, “there was no evidence of any Soviet complicity [in the revolution].” Alarmed by the growing confidence of liberation movements throughout the world, Brzezinski decided that if Afghanistan was to succeed under the PDPA, its independence and progress would offer the “threat of a promising example.”

On July 3, 1979, the White House secretly authorized $500 million in arms and logistics to support tribal “fundamentalist” groups known as the mujaheddin. The aim was the overthrow of Afghanistan’s first secular, reformist government. In August 1979, the US Embassy in Kabul reported: “The United States’ larger interests … would be served by the demise of [the PDPA government], despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reforms in Afghanistan.”

The mujaheddin were the forebears of and the Islamic State. They included Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who received tens of millions of dollars in cash from the CIA. Hekmatyar’s specialty was trafficking in opium and throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil. Invited to London, he was lauded by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as a “freedom fighter.”

Such fanatics might have remained in their tribal world had Brzezinski not launched an international movement to promote Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia and so undermine secular political liberation and “destabilize” the Soviet Union, creating, as he wrote in his autobiography, “a few stirred up Muslims.” His grand plan coincided with the ambitions of�� the Pakistani dictator, Gen. Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, to dominate the region. In 1986, the CIA and ’s intelligence agency, the ISI, began to recruit people from around the world to join the Afghan jihad. The Saudi multi-millionaire Osama bin Laden was one of them. Operatives who would eventually join the Taliban and al-Qaeda were recruited at an Islamic college in Brooklyn, New York, and given paramilitary training at a CIA camp in Virginia. This was called “Operation Cyclone.” Its success was celebrated in 1996 when the last PDPA president of Afghanistan, Mohammed Najibullah — who had gone before the UN General Assembly to plead for help — was hanged from a streetlight by the Taliban.

The “blowback” of Operation Cyclone and its “few stirred up Muslims” was September 11, 2001. Operation Cyclone became the “War on Terror,” in which countless men, women and children would lose their lives across the Muslim world, from Afghanistan to Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and Syria. The enforcer’s message was and remains: “You are with us or against us.”

Afghanistan © Shutterstock

The common thread in fascism, past and present, is mass murder. The American invasion of Vietnam had its “free fire zones,” “body counts” and “collateral damage.” In the province of Quang Ngai, where I reported from, many thousands of civilians (“gooks”) were murdered by the US; yet only one massacre, at My Lai, is remembered. In Laos and Cambodia, the greatest aerial bombardment in history produced an epoch of terror marked today by the spectacle of joined-up bomb craters which, from the air, resemble monstrous necklaces. The bombing gave Cambodia its own Islamic State, led by Pol Pot.

Drones and the “Kill List”

Today, the world’s greatest single campaign of terror entails the execution of entire families, guests at weddings, mourners at funerals. These are Obama’s victims. According to The New York Times, Obama makes his selection from a CIA “kill list” presented to him every Tuesday in the White House Situation Room. He then decides, without a shred of legal justification, who will live and who will die. His execution weapon is the Hellfire missile carried by a pilotless aircraft known as a drone; these roast their victims and festoon the area with their remains. Each “hit” is registered on a faraway console screen as a “bugsplat.”

“For goose-steppers,” wrote the historian Norman Pollock, “substitute the seemingly more innocuous militarisation of the total culture. And for the bombastic leader, we have the reformer manque, blithely at work, planning and executing assassination, smiling all the while.”

Uniting fascism old and new is the cult of superiority. “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being,” said Obama, evoking declarations of national fetishism from the 1930s. As the historian Alfred W. McCoy has pointed out, it was the Adolf Hitler devotee, Carl Schmitt, who said: “The sovereign is he who decides the exception.” This sums up Americanism, the world’s dominant ideology. That it remains unrecognized as a predatory ideology is the achievement of an equally unrecognized brainwashing. Insidious, undeclared, presented wittily as enlightenment on the march, its conceit insinuates Western culture. I grew up on a cinematic diet of American glory, almost all of it a distortion. I had no idea it was the Red Army that had destroyed most of the Nazi war machine, at a cost of as many as 13 million soldiers. By contrast, US losses, including in the Pacific, were 400,000. Hollywood reversed this.

The difference now is that cinema audiences are invited to wring their hands at the “tragedy” of American psychopaths having to kill people in distant places — just as the president himself kills them. The embodiment of Hollywood’s violence, the actor and director Clint Eastwood was nominated for an Oscar this year for his movie, , which is about a licensed murderer and nutcase. The New York Times described it as a “patriotic, pro-family picture which broke all attendance records in its opening days.”

There are no heroic movies about America’s embrace of fascism. During the Second World War, America (and Britain) went to war against Greeks who had fought heroically against Nazism and were resisting the rise of Greek fascism. In 1967, the CIA helped bring to power a fascist military junta in Athens — as it did in and most of Latin America. Germans and eastern Europeans who had colluded with Nazi aggression and crimes against humanity were given safe haven in the US; many were pampered and their talents rewarded. Wernher von Braun was the “father” of both the Nazi V-2 terror bomb and the US space program.

© Shutterstock

In the 1990s, as former Soviet republics, eastern Europe and the Balkans became military outposts of NATO, the heirs to a Nazi movement in were given their opportunity. Responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews, Poles and Russians during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, Ukrainian fascism was rehabilitated and its “new wave” hailed by the enforcer as “nationalists.”

Ukraine’s Fascist Problem

This reached its apogee in 2014, when the Obama administration splashed out $5 billion on a coup against the elected government. The shock troops were neo-Nazis known as the Right Sector and . Their leaders include Oleh Tyahnybok, who has called for a purge of the “Moscow-Jewish mafia” and “other scum,” including gays, feminists and those on the political left.

These fascists are now integrated into the Kiev coup government. The first deputy speaker of the Ukrainian parliament, Andriy Parubiy, a leader of the governing party, is co-founder of Svoboda. On February 14, Parubiy announced he was flying to Washington get “the USA to give us highly precise modern weaponry.” If he succeeds, it will be seen as an act of war by Russia.

No Western leader has spoken up about the revival of fascism in the heart of Europe — with the exception of , whose people lost 22 million to a Nazi invasion that came through the borderland of Ukraine. At the recent Munich Security Conference, Obama’s assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland, ranted abuse about European leaders for opposing the US arming of the Kiev regime. She referred to the German defense minister as “the minister for defeatism.” It was Nuland who masterminded the coup in Kiev. The wife of Robert D. Kagan, a leading “neo-con” luminary and co-founder of the extreme right-wing Project for a New American Century, she was foreign policy advisor to Dick Cheney.��

Nuland’s coup did not go to plan. NATO was prevented from seizing ’s historic, legitimate, warm-water naval base in . The mostly Russian population of Crimea — illegally annexed to Ukraine by Nikita Krushchev in 1954 — voted overwhelmingly to return to Russia, as they had done in the 1990s. The referendum was voluntary, popular and internationally observed. There was no invasion.

At the same time, the Kiev regime turned on the ethnic Russian population in the east with the ferocity of ethnic cleaning. Deploying neo-Nazi militias in the manner of the Waffen-SS, they bombed and laid to siege cities and towns. They used mass starvation as a weapon, cutting off electricity, freezing bank accounts, stopping social security and pensions. More than a million refugees fled across the border into Russia. In Western media, they became unpeople escaping “the violence” caused by the “Russian invasion.” The NATO commander, Gen. Philip Breedlove — whose name and actions might have been inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove — announced that 40,000 Russian troops were “massing.” In the age of forensic satellite evidence, he offered none.

Ukraine © Shutterstock

These Russian-speaking and bilingual people of Ukraine — a third of the population — have long sought a federation that reflects the country’s ethnic diversity and is both autonomous and independent of Moscow. Most are not “separatists” but citizens who want to live securely in their homeland and oppose the power grab in Kiev. Their revolt and establishment of autonomous “states” are a reaction to Kiev’s attacks on them. Little of this has been explained to Western audiences.

On May 2, 2014, in Odessa, 41 ethnic Russians were burned alive in the trade union headquarters with police standing by. The Right Sector leader, Dmytro Yarosh, hailed the massacre as “another bright day in our national history.” In the American and British media, this was reported as a “murky tragedy” resulting from “clashes” between “nationalists” (neo-Nazis) and “separatists” (people collecting signatures for a referendum on a federal Ukraine).

The New York Times buried the story, having dismissed as Russian propaganda warnings about the fascist and anti-Semitic policies of Washington’s new clients. The Wall Street Journal damned the victims — “Deadly Ukraine Fire Likely Sparked by Rebels, Government Says.” Obama congratulated the junta for its “restraint.”

If Putin can be provoked into coming to their aid, his pre-ordained “pariah” role in the West will justify the lie that Russia is invading Ukraine. On January 29, Ukraine’s top military commander, Gen. Viktor Muzhemko, almost inadvertently dismissed the very basis for US and European Union sanctions on Russia when he told a news conference emphatically: “The Ukrainian army is not fighting with the regular units of the Russian Army.” There were “individual citizens” who were members of “illegal armed groups,” but there was no Russian invasion. This was not news. Vadym Prystaiko, Kiev’s deputy foreign minister, has called for “full scale war” with nuclear-armed Russia.

On February 21, US Senator James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma, introduced a bill that would authorize American arms for the Kiev regime. In his Senate presentation, Inhofe used photographs he claimed were of Russian troops crossing into Ukraine, which have long been exposed as fakes. It was reminiscent of Ronald Reagan’s fake pictures of a Soviet installation in Nicaragua and Colin Powell’s fake evidence to the UN of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

The intensity of the smear campaign against Russia and the portrayal of its president as a pantomime villain is unlike anything I have known as a reporter. Robert Parry, one of America’s most distinguished investigative journalists who revealed the Iran-Contra scandal, wrote recently: “No European government, since Adolf Hitler’s Germany, has seen fit to dispatch Nazi storm troopers to wage war on a domestic population, but the Kiev regime has and has done so knowingly. Yet across the West’s media/political spectrum, there has been a studious effort to cover up this reality even to the point of ignoring facts that have been well established … If you wonder how the world could stumble into World War Three — much as it did into World War One a century ago — all you need to do is look at the madness over Ukraine that has proved impervious to facts or reason.”

© Shutterstock

In 1946, the Nuremberg Tribunal prosecutor said of the German media: “The use made by Nazi conspirators of psychological warfare is well known. Before each major aggression, with some few exceptions based on expediency, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically for the attack … In the propaganda system of the Hitler State it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons.”

In The Guardian on February 2, Timothy Garton-Ash called, in effect, for a world war. “Putin must be stopped,” said the headline. “And sometimes only guns can stop guns.” He conceded that the threat of war might “nourish a Russian paranoia of encirclement” — but that was fine. He name-checked the military equipment needed for the job and advised his readers that “America has the best kit.”

In 2003, Garton-Ash, an Oxford professor, repeated the propaganda that led to the slaughter in Iraq. , he wrote, “has, as [Colin] Powell documented, stockpiled large quantities of horrifying chemical and biological weapons, and is hiding what remains of them. He is still trying to get nuclear ones.” He lauded Blair as a “Gladstonian, Christian liberal interventionist.” In 2006, he wrote: “Now we face the next big test of the west: after Iraq, Iran.”

The outbursts — or as Garton-Ash prefers, his “tortured liberal ambivalence” — are not untypical of those in the transatlantic liberal elite who have struck a Faustian deal. The war criminal Blair is their lost leader. The Guardian, in which Garton-Ash’s piece appeared, published a full-page advertisement for an American Stealth bomber. On a menacing image of the Lockheed Martin monster were the words: “The F-35. GREAT For Britain.” This American “kit” will cost British taxpayers £1.3 billion, its F-model predecessors having slaughtered across the world. In tune with its advertiser, a Guardian editorial has demanded an increase in military spending.

What Do They Want?

Once again, there is serious purpose. The rulers of the world want Ukraine not only as a missile base: they want its economy. Kiev’s new finance minister, Nataliwe Jaresko, is a former senior US State Department official in charge of US overseas “investment.” She was hurriedly given Ukrainian citizenship.

They want Ukraine for its abundant gas; US Vice President Joe Biden’s son is on the board of Ukraine’s biggest oil, gas and fracking company. The manufacturers of GM seeds, companies such as the infamous Monsanto, want Ukraine’s rich farming soil.

Above all, they want Ukraine’s mighty neighbor, Russia. They want to Balkanize or dismember Russia and exploit the greatest source of natural gas on earth. As the Arctic ice melts, they want control of the Arctic Ocean and its energy riches and Russia’s long Arctic land border. Their man in Moscow used to be Boris Yeltsin, a drunk, who handed his country’s economy to the West. His successor, Putin, has reestablished Russia as a sovereign nation; that is his crime.

The responsibility of the rest of us is clear: It is to identify and expose the reckless lies of warmongers and never to collude with them. It is to reawaken the great popular movements that brought a fragile civilization to modern imperial states. Most important, it is to prevent the conquest of ourselves: our minds, our humanity, our self-respect. If we remain silent, victory over us is assured and a holocaust beckons.

*[John Pilger’s articles and films can be found at��.]

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President will seek ’ support for a carefully tailored, multi-year strategy to “defeat” the shadowy (ISIS). Unlike the other localized war into which Obama has led the , the air campaign that led to the overthrow of Libyan autocrat , we are����that this time “the Obama administration is no longer ‘leading from behind,’ but plans to play the central role.”

, of course, is surely the most glaring foreign policy debacle of the Obama presidency, and not because of miscalculations about an armed mob in two years ago. The country’s descent into chaos is a reproach to those who embraced that particular regime’s change as a multilateral cause. Before Americans and others engage in an open-ended war in antiquity’s Fertile Crescent, we should be clear about what worked and what did not in the Libyan operation.

is actually the easier piece of the puzzle, perhaps because American unilateralism had already shattered the country 11 years ago. The authorities in Baghdad and Erbil, the capital of the Kurdish region, are pleading for international aid, making the Libya lessons less salient. A desperate Baghdad government agreed to Obama’s core conditions for US help — dump the sectarian Prime Minister and create an inclusive government — and the campaign to reverse ISIS’ gains in Iraq is already underway. The president personally pressed European allies at the summit to join the effort.

But while “everybody is on board [with] Iraq,” an administration aide acknowledges, “when it comes to Syria, there’s more concern.” It is that remains the conjoined twin of Libya. The chaos across Libya today makes a mockery of armchair interventionists, who argue that if Obama had just provided the military aid and air cover to rebels in Syria three years ago that the NATO-Arab coalition did in Libya, today Syria would be a happy place at peace with the world.

The Intervention in Libya

Assembling the coalition for international intervention was actually the moment of greatest American success in trying to steer Libya toward a sustainable transition. That coalition was built on the emerging international doctrine of a “responsibility to protect” populations threatened by atrocities and genocide. With Arab League backing in hand, UN Ambassador Susan Rice tested support at the United Nations Security Council; Obama himself called a skeptical , president of , to win his backing; and then-Secretary of State met with Russian Foreign Minister .

In her memoir,��Hard Choices, Clinton offers this����of her meeting with Lavrov:

“‘We don’t want another war,’ I told Lavrov. ‘Our goal is to protect civilians from brutal and indiscriminate attacks.’

“‘I take your point about not seeking another war,’ he responded. ‘But that doesn’t mean that you won’t get one.’ However, he added, the Russians had no interest in protecting Qaddafi or seeing him slaughter his people. I explained that our resolution would incorporate the Russian proposal for a cease-fire, but that it had to also authorize a forceful response if Qaddafi refused to stop his advance. ‘We can’t vote in favor,’ Lavrov said. ‘But we will abstain and it will pass.’

“In later discussions, especially about Syria, Lavrov claimed he had been misled about our intentions. That struck me as disingenuous since Lavrov, as a former Ambassador to the UN, knew as well as anyone what ‘all necessary measures’ meant.”

But in fairness, Lavrov also knew what it means when the Security Council “demands the immediate establishment of a ceasefire” and endorses the African Union’s effort at “facilitating dialogue to lead to the political reforms necessary to find a peaceful and sustainable solution,” two provisions that were the key to winning passage of Security Council Resolution 1973. Yet when Zuma led a delegation of African presidents to Libya to seek a negotiated settlement, the resolution’s sponsors encouraged the rebel factions in Benghazi to refuse to meet them and rejected any ceasefire till the hated Qaddafi was overthrown.

Qaddafi’s ghost has hovered over every effort to find a solution to Syria’s catastrophic civil war, conjured by Russians as malign proof of Washington’s obsessive compulsion with regime change. Obama’s caution about jumping into the Syrian Civil War seems tacitly to acknowledge that the intervention went awry.��

Clinton’s memoir does not reveal when Washington, Paris and London decided to scuttle the UN mandate to seek a negotiated transition and instead press the war until Qaddafi was eliminated. Perhaps there was never a conscious decision point to that end. Very possibly Qaddafi would have balked at any serious negotiation, in which case Zuma, Lavrov and others would know where the onus lay.

Militarily, the interventionist coalition successfully accomplished the burden-sharing on which Obama had insisted. Politically, it proved unable to chart the way to the “sustainable solution” sought by the Security Council. Sadly, the destruction — rather than transfer of loyalties — of Tripoli’s army and the simultaneous empowerment of sundry armed militias have dashed Libyans’ hopes for their post-Qaddafi future.

Syria and Qaddafi’s Ghost

Qaddafi’s ghost has hovered over every effort to find a solution to Syria’s catastrophic civil war, conjured by Russians as malign proof of Washington’s obsessive compulsion with regime change. Obama’s caution about jumping into the Syrian Civil War seems tacitly to acknowledge that the intervention went awry. So how should it affect the conduct of the campaign against ISIS?

As the new UN high commissioner for human rights, Zeid Ra’ad Zeid al-Hussein, noted in his��maiden��: “It is clear that the immediate and urgent priority of the international community should be to halt the increasingly conjoined conflicts in Iraq and Syria.” But conjoined does not mean identical; appalling as the violence of Syrian President ’s repression is, Hussein singles out the “takfiris” — with ISIS in the lead — as the international threat.

We should certainly be wary of a military campaign in Syria that treats both ISIS and the entrenched Assad government as our enemies. Realists must acknowledge that Assad will not be overthrown, and his regime has its own stake in the defeat of ISIS. The coalition the Obama administration is building should seek a long-term truce between the government and so-called moderate insurgents, allowing international cooperation with both in the campaign to root out the ISIS takfiris.

Such an overture could contribute to broader coalition-building against the real and implacable threat of ISIS, on which even governments as unfriendly as ’s and ’s take our side. It would then be possible, under a carefully written and scrupulously implemented resolution, to garner the Security Council approval against ISIS that some potential partners would require for their participation.

And of course, President Obama should be seeking Congressional authorization for the use of US military force for this policy, defining the parameters and specifying the costs. Wars are not the unilateral prerogative of one country, much less of one political leader, and our Congress must take on its war-powers responsibility. As Clinton herself��: “For the world we’re trying to build, where we have a lot of responsible actors who are willing to step up and lead, it is exactly what we should be doing.”

*[This article was originally published by .]

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The ongoing political dispute in Libya between a secularist and liberal political alliance and Islamist groups is a significant contributing factor to violence afflicting the country. Militia groups that are allied with a retired Libyan general,��,��and his “Libyan National Army” have seized upon their disagreements with Islamist parties in order to conduct armed operations against their political enemies in Tripoli and Benghazi. ��cooperating with Gen. Haftar have attacked the Libyan parliament, the General National Congress (GNC), and are trying to force the GNC to dissolve itself and transfer its powers to a transitional assembly that would rewrite the country’s constitution.

Further complicating the conflict is Haftar’s����that he will not order his forces to stop their offensive until they “eradicate terrorism and extremist groups,” by which he means his political enemies. Haftar’s political and military opponents who support the GNC argue that he is attempting a “” against Libya’s legitimate government.

Long-running��militia ��in and around Tripoli in the aftermath of Muammar Qadhafi’s rule is another complicating factor that has allowed local militia rivalries to be inflamed by��political . These events continue to demonstrate the strong impact of��sub-state in Libya’s sociopolitical system, which could lead the country into another civil war.

Nicholas A. Heras speaks to Andrew Engel, an Africa analyst who received a grant with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy to research current events in Libya.��Engel visited the country after its official liberation and has published extensively on Libya since its uprising and successful revolution in 2011.

Nicholas A. Heras: To what extent is Libya’s ongoing conflict a war over control of oil reserves?

Andrew Engel:��The current crisis is not a direct result of the almost year-long conflict between federalists seeking greater autonomy, led by Ibrahim al-Jathran who has blockaded oil export terminals, and the central government. Instead, recent violence is the result of an escalating competition for legitimacy in post-revolution Libya. The conflict can be characterized as Islamist against non-Islamist forces. But it can also be characterized as revolutionary against “reactionary” forces that include former members of the regime and armed forces (defectors who fought the regime, those who remained on the fence, and those who supported the regime).

The first sign of this fissure among anti-Qadhafi forces was the war-time assassination of Gen. Abdul Fatah Younes in August 2011, who defected to the revolutionaries’ side and was likely killed by Islamist fighters. Post-war, Islamists and revolutionaries forced the passage in the General National Congress (GNC) of the Political Isolation Law in May 2013, which excluded from political life all who had connections with the former regime for a period of ten years. The escalating campaign of assassinations and attacks against retired and current members of security forces also helped create this backlash against Islamist and revolutionary forces.

Haftar is controversial. Many support his goals of eradicating extremism and Islamist militias, but stop short of supporting the man himself. As much as Haftar seeks to emulate��the new Egyptian president, he has not come close to the adulation Sisi earned after ousting��Mohammed��Morsi.

Again, this is about legitimacy. Operation Karama under Khalifa Haftar’s leadership claims the GNC is illegitimate for the extension of its own mandate in February 2014; its inability to rebuild the armed forces, while legitimizing and bankrolling Islamist militias; and unwillingness to combat extremists in Cyrenaica province. In contrast, those in opposition to Karama see only naked aggression against the country’s primary representative body and “true rebels,” who are the proper heirs of the revolution.

Heras: How much of the current fighting is a result of antipathy toward��Islamist militias, such as Ansar al-Sharia,��that have strong influence on��the country’s Cyrenaica region and the Muslim Brotherhood-inspired Justice and Construction Party?

Engel:��Myriad forces came into alignment to bring Libya to the brink. In Cyrenaica, Operation Karama consists of former Gen. Haftar’s National Libyan Army — predominantly official armed forces units that resent the preferential treatment given to Islamist militias by the GNC — and Wanes Boukhmade’s Sa’iqa Special Forces in Cyrenaica, which deployed to Benghazi in summer 2013. Both are aligned against Islamist militias such as the February 17 Brigade and the more notorious Ansar al-Sharia Brigade, whose Benghazi and Derna forces the US has designated a foreign terrorist organization.

The Sa’iqa Special Forces are largely supported in Benghazi, but loathed by Islamists for their role in suppressing Islamist fighters in Cyrenaica during the 1990s. Jathran’s forces, generally antipathetic to Islamist militias, support Operation Karama. However, some view Jathran with skepticism and see in him opportunism more than true ideological commitment.��For example, Jathran, who had close relations with the former Islamist fighter in Afghanistan and deputy defense minister, Saddiq al-Gheithi, had opposed former Prime Minister Ali Zeidan’s government — remnants of which have sided with Operation Karama like the new prime minister, Abdullah al-Thinni.

In Tripolitania, the Zintani-associated al-Qaaqaa, al-Sawaiq and al-Madani Brigades, which operated under the Ministry of Defense, moved against the Islamist-dominated GNC, Islamist militias and Islamist-leaning forces operating under the Ministry of Interior and chief of staff of the Armed Forces. The Zintanis have long-sided with the National Forces Alliance and Zeidan; the brother of Othman Mligta, commander of the Qaaqaa Brigade, led the NFA’s steering committee. Like the Sa’iqa Special Forces in Cyrenaica, many enlisted with the Zintani brigades had previously served under the Qadhafi regime, most notoriously with the Khamis Brigade. It is important to note that while these brigades sided with Haftar’s cause, they, as well as Boukhmade and Jathran, are likely to oppose any moves by the general to impose himself as a political leader.

The dynamics vary greatly from Cyrenaica to Tripolitania, namely because the extremist Islamist element in the former is far more prevalent than in the latter, where political Islamists such as the Misratah-based Muslim Brotherhood have a greater presence. Moreover, there is still a semblance of a political game to be played in Tripoli, one that is absent in Benghazi. However, this is not to say that violence will necessarily continue to remain low-level in Tripoli.

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Heras: Is the conflict in Libya��also complicated by tribal, ethnic and personal rivalries and, if it is, which of these rivalries are contributing the most to tension in the country?

Engel:��These divisions do exist, although in more subtle ways than the Islamist/non-Islamist and revolutionary/reactionary cleavage. Haftar’s initiative was preceded by months of campaigning among the eastern tribes, while the Zintanis [from western Libya] have been slowly attempting since the end of the revolution to heal old alliances with tribes that remained committed to the Qadhafi regime.

Ethnic divisions are not as prominent, with the exception of the Amazigh in Tripolitania, who have sided with Misratah against the Zintanis. Libya’s ethnic minorities in the south have not played a significant role yet.

Heras: Which foreign actors, if any, have the most power to influence internal power dynamics of Libya?

Engel:��Libya’s state of polarization is problematic for foreign actors. In short, all actors that want a say are already accused of bias. Islamists, for example, would not trust neighboring Algeria and Egypt for any sort of impartial and fair influence in the conflict: Algeria, because of its military rule and brutal civil war against Islamists, and Egypt, because Haftar seems to be emulating what Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s had achieved against the Muslim Brotherhood in 2013.

Haftar is also accused of being an American agent, a claim his opponents believe is reinforced by Ambassador Deborah Jones’ refusal to condemn him for targeting extremist groups. The Qataris and their��Al Jazeera��satellite news station are also accused of supporting Islamists, while the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and the Saudi-owned��Al Arabiya��satellite news station are accused of bias against Islamists.

Nonetheless, common ground between countries with an interest in combating extremism and forces aligned under Operation Karama could be used as a starting point for engagement. In contrast, countries with an interest in sustaining the political process, no matter how tarnished it has become, can also choose to engage with the Islamist/revolutionary faction that purports to defend the GNC and the democratic process.

Encouragingly, Libya’s Supreme Court ruled in favor of al-Thinni to lead as prime minister over the Misratah- and Islamist-supported Ahmed Maeteeq, a verdict all sides appear to have accepted without recourse to violence. While this represents a chance for Tripolitania to return to the politics track, violence will likely continue in Cyrenaica with more hard-line groups likes Ansar al-Sharia that reject democratic politics entirely.

Heras: Will Haftar emerge as a “Sisi-type” figure in Libya that can unite anti-Islamist factions? If he can, what would the implications of that development have for the future of the country and the greater North Africa and Sahel/Sahara regions?��

Engel:��Haftar is controversial. Many support his goals of eradicating extremism and Islamist militias, but stop short of supporting the man himself. As much as Haftar seeks to emulate the new Egyptian president, he has not come close to the adulation Sisi earned after ousting Mohammed Morsi.

Should the former general actually succeed in his goals — which is in itself a tall order — it remains to be seen if support for his campaign will transform into support for Haftar as a leader. Aside from his campaign against Islamists, Haftar has expounded very little on his political vision for the future of Libya.

The views expressed��in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect��51�Թ�’s��editorial policy.

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The “Arab Spring” never ended as an exercise in democracy. Rather, it served as a pathway used by Islamist groups to legitimize, mobilize and spread their ideological beliefs, while calling it the people’s democratic choice. The rise of militant Islamist groups was an inevitable consequence of the revolutions that swept the Arab world. The lack of any previously defined ideological basis to support these movements, and an absence of a coherent roadmap that would define what protesters wanted to achieve were the ingredients necessary for creating chaos and fragmentation in various countries of the region. The rise of violence, government failures and clashes among different interest groups have provided a golden opportunity for certain organizations and individuals trying to take over power.

The complex tribal composition of Libyan society and its fragile post-Qaddafi state have set the stage for turmoil and a potential civil war in the absence of careful demilitarization, application of conflict resolution tactics, and reintegration of militias into the larger society. Previously elected Libyan governments have had the chance to take such actions in the past three years, but failed dramatically. Libya still lacks a constitution; its parliament is polarized and divided into liberals and Islamists who want to set their ideologies in stone. These parties adamantly refuse to negotiate to establish some middle ground.

Amid escalating tensions with liberals and Islamists, the spread of violence and clashes among tribes throughout the country, and the impotence of the government to create peace and harmony, a renegade general,��,��has taken on his shoulders the responsibility of fixing the political fiasco. Haftar intends to defeat Islamist groups such as Ansar al-Sharia, promising to secure peace and unite the Libyan people. While both his claims and capability to achieve his military ambitions are highly questionable, Libya is coming closer than ever before in its history to a deadly civil war.

Haftar’s Intentions in Libya

Gen. Haftar’s military career has been largely characterized by schizophrenic attitudes and decisions. He started his military life in line with Muammar Qaddafi’s objectives, supporting him in a coup against the Libyan king, and serving him in the Chadian-Libyan conflict in the 1980s, which became the reason as to why Haftar was discharged from the army. From that time, he took refuge in the United States, where he joined opposition groups, such as the National Front for the Salvation of Libya (NFSL), attempting to oust Qaddafi. During the outbreak of the Arab Spring, Haftar returned to Libya and aligned himself with both NATO and Islamist militias against Qaddafi. In February, he publically announced his plans for a military coup to topple the current government, wreaking havoc in an already chaotic country.

While he publically announced that he has no intention to hold any political position in the future, Haftar’s words have been met with suspicion. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in Egypt made the same claim when he first ousted Mohammed Morsi, but later changed his mind.

Haftar’s genuine intentions are difficult to predict, given his ambiguous decisions in the past. His current mission has not been solely to dislodge the militant Islamist groups, as he has also instigated a violent assault on an elected government by attacking its parliament. This has exacerbated the split between liberals and Islamists in Libya and added more fuel to the fire in a fragile country that is on the verge of civil war. While he publically����that he has no intention to hold any political position in the future, Haftar’s words have been met with suspicion.����in Egypt made the same claim when he first ousted Mohammed Morsi, but later changed his mind.

If Haftar manages to gain more support from major tribes in Benghazi and Misrata, he may nominate himself as a candidate for the next election. However, this will most likely result in a deeply fragmented Libyan society for many years to come.

A Replica of Egypt?

While the approach Haftar is taking to demolish an elected government in Libya seems quite similar to that of Sisi’s in Egypt, the mission he pretends to take on to eradicate Islamists and “terrorists” is not. Islamist groups in Libya do not have the same institutional capacity or ideological maturity as those in Egypt.

Furthermore, in the absence of a solid and united military institution, again unlike that in Egypt, militias with different tribal origins will continue to dominate. Perhaps it is safe to say that Libya is closer to the Syrian example rather than the Egyptian one, given the strikingly different contextual factors of the two countries.

A Race With No Finish Line

Confrontation has never been an effective tool to restore peace and order in any modern society. In a cultural environment characterized by tribalism, confrontation often tends to lead to deeper resistance, fragmentation and violence. The approach Haftar is taking endangers the future stability of Libya and promises a civil war on a large-scale. Libya has neither a strong army, nor institutionally functional political parties, and will require time before it is able to establish operational institutions.

The ministers of interior and culture have shown their support for the renegade general, while thousands of people are joining his self-declared army. The international community seems hesitant to support Haftar. So far, most Western governments have stressed the need for dialogue and peaceful negotiations rather than military force. However, Haftar continues to insist on violence as the only means of solving the conflict. This could allow for many internal and external hands to be involved in shaping the political stage of Libya, by providing support either to Islamist or liberal militias. Years of armed struggle that would be quite difficult to control could be the potential result of this situation.

Hence, Haftar seems to be running a race that has no finish line, and will most likely reawaken tribal feuds that have been long forgotten. This will, in the worst-case scenario, result in another Syria-like experience in the heart of North Africa. Haftar is continuously garnering more support from various government officials, tribes and militias. He has seized the opportunity of the current power vacuum and is trying to consolidate his position as a hero who wants to rescue Libya. But instead of being a blessing to Libyan society, Haftar might add more salt to the wound and evaporate any hopes of stability or unity in the country.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Iraq, a founding member of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), has large oil reserves which are unevenly spread across the country. As of January 2013, it also held the 12^th largest natural gas reserves in the world, with over 60% being located in southern Iraq. 

Situated along some of the region's key fault lines, Iraq's future is likely to determine some of the wider issues and conflicts in the Middle East.

51�Թ�'s Middle East Editor, Manuel Langendorf, speaks to , a senior analyst specializing in Middle East affairs for the risk management group Helios Global. Langendorf and Zambelis talk about the causes of violence in Iraq, the players involved, and the country's potential in the world energy market.

Manuel Langendorf: I would like to talk about energy. Iraq is estimated to have the fifth largest proven crude oil reserves in the world, with many analysts pointing to a lot of exploration potential not being realized yet. How do you assess Iraq's position on the world energy market and its potential?

Chris Zambelis: Without a doubt, Iraq is a vital player in international oil markets. Its position as a major oil producer is especially important, given that a wide consensus of projections for global oil demand sees it as remaining steady in the foreseeable future and likely to rise over the long-term on the back of strengthening demand from Asia. We also have to remember that Iraq's potential as an energy producer has been stymied over the years due to conflict, economic sanctions, underdevelopment, mismanagement and politics.

In this context, Iraq has tremendous potential. This is the case despite the ongoing global economic downturn. Other factors, including neighboring Iran's anticipated return to international energy markets — Iran is another major oil player that has failed to realize its full potential as a producer and exporter due to economic sanctions and politics, among other things — have not diminished Iraq's significance as an oil producer. 

The growing availability of tight (shale) oil; natural gas and related natural gas liquids (NGL); oil sands; coal-to-liquid (CTL) derived fuels; biofuels; widespread interest in new and alternative energy resources; and the rapid pace of technological innovation that is yielding more efficient energy consumption patterns have not erased the importance of crude oil. 

There are other factors to consider when assessing the importance of Iraq in international oil markets. Let us not forget that Libya, a major oil producer in its own right, has failed to realize its potential as an oil producer due to ongoing violence and political instability. The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster also rattled international energy markets; Japan, a huge energy importer, was forced to increase its imports of oil (and other hydrocarbons) to compensate for the lack of nuclear energy that had to be taken offline. 

In short, crude oil remains vital to the functioning of the global economy today and will remain critical for some time to come. Consequently, the presence of additional supply of oil is welcomed by consumer nations around the globe. And when you have a country with the unrealized potential of Iraq, naturally, it is no surprise why so many are watching its steady return to energy markets with great interest.

Langendorf: How does the location of energy reserves within Iraq affect Iraqi politics?

Zambelis: The placement of Iraq's oil reserves is certainly an important factor in affecting Iraqi (and regional) politics. This is best illustrated in Iraq's northern Kurdish region, which is home to a significant percentage of Iraqi oil reserves. The ability of Iraqi Kurds to leverage the crude oil resources lying within their jurisdiction in northern Iraq (Iraqi Kurdistan) has bolstered their efforts to secure autonomy and otherwise gain substantial geopolitical influence under the auspices of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). 

But there remains a great deal of controversy over the disposition of Iraqi oil originating in KRG-administered territory relating to extraction, export rights and revenue sharing. The central authorities in Baghdad want to limit the ability of the KRG to extract and export oil out of fears that it will lead to the region's eventual secession. 

The KRG has already secured numerous agreements with international oil majors and currently operates a pipeline that ships oil to Turkey. Baghdad considers the KRG's efforts to engage with foreign companies as a way of evading its authority. The central government has also punished foreign oil companies over their relationship with the KRG. For example, Baghdad barred US oil major Chevron Corporation from operating in central and southern Iraq as a result of its engagement with the KRG. 

The location of significant oil reserves in southern Iraq, such as in Basra Province, has also impacted Iraq's domestic political picture. Some of Iraq's most important oil fields are located in Basra Province. It is no surprise the region has enjoyed a contentious relationship with Baghdad over a range of issues. Basra Province continues to lobby for more political autonomy from Baghdad and to have greater input on energy-related investment issues. A number of local factions also continue to push for the region to be granted a formal autonomous status. 

Langendorf: What interests do other countries in the region have in Iraq, especially when it comes to its energy reserves? Which other countries are involved in Iraq's energy market? China, for example, is expanding its influence across the region.

Zambelis: On the demand side, owing to its position as a key source of crude oil reserves and potentially natural gas further down the line, key consumers in Asia led by China but also India and South Korea have a major stake in Iraqi oil. China, in particular, has been among the most active in terms of increasing its purchases of Iraqi oil and also engaging in upstream and downstream activities. For its part, Iraq has identified China as a strategic market for its exports of crude oil. 

In 2008, the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) concluded an agreement with Iraq's North Oil Company (NOC) to develop the al-Ahdab oil field. The agreement, which was estimated at around $3.5 billion, represented the first between Iraq and China since 2003. China imported around 500,000 barrels of oil per day (bpd) from Iraq in 2012. In 2013, China's imports of Iraqi oil increased by 50%. China has also expressed its intention to import even more oil from Iraq in 2014. The geopolitical implications of growing Chinese interest in Iraqi oil will be profound, especially in the context of China's relations with Saudi Arabia and Iran.

It is worth mentioning that China has also engaged with the KRG over energy projects, however, nowhere to the extent comparable to its dealings with Baghdad.

At this stage, the United States and Europe also represent an important destination for Iraqi oil exports. Iraqi oil, by way of Iraqi Kurdistan, is also flowing to Turkey by way of a newly minted pipeline that became operational in January. In terms of development of upstream and downstream projects, a host of international energy majors representing the United States, Canada, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia are, to different degrees, active in the Iraqi energy sector.

Langendorf: How do you see the situation in Iraq evolving? What regional role is Iraq likely to play in the future?  

Zambelis: I see the situation in Iraq remaining highly volatile in the near- to medium-terms. Iraq is likely to continue to experience escalating violence and terrorism. Much of these hostilities will be expressed through sectarian animosities but will ultimately remain a product of deeper social, political and economic grievances. These circumstances will be inflamed by the ongoing conflict in Syria. 

I also believe the role of regional players, particularly Saudi Arabia, is underreported when it comes to the trajectory of events in Iraq. A stable, strong and unified Iraq has tremendous potential to project power in the Persian Gulf and wider Middle East. By default, this scenario threatens Saudi Arabia. 

When considered in the context of the incremental rapprochement between the United States and Iran, Saudi Arabia's long-term prospects as a regional power start to look dim. As a result, it is likely that Saudi Arabia will up the ante in terms of attempting to shape events in Iraq. Saudi Arabia's aggressive stance toward Syria may provide a window into its possible approach toward Iraq down the line. I think this is something that warrants closer attention in the months to come.     

*[Note: The opinions expressed here are the interviewee's alone and do not necessarily reflect the position of Helios Global, Inc.] 

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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In its most hard-worded statement to date, the Libyan government on March 20 vowed to eliminate terrorism and mobilize "the national military force" to confront the threat.

According to the : "The cities of Benghazi, Derna, Sirte and others face a terrorist war led by Libyan and foreign elements that have hostile and sinister agendas." The embattled government also called for international help to curb rampant security threats.

March 19 marked the anniversary of the NATO-led military campaign that helped oust Muammar Qadhafi. Three years later, the country is beset by almost daily internecine fighting; attacks on security officers, foreigners and activists; economic problems; oil blockades; and virtually a nonexistent political process.

While international cooperation was pivotal to ejecting Libya's idiosyncratic dictator during the uprising, assistance lacks luster in its restive aftermath. Earlier this month, representatives of over 30 countries converged on Rome to discuss how to stabilize Libya. The biggest international gathering in two years was rife with rhetoric, but sparse on specifics.

Foreign efforts to help Libya founder on the fundamental problem of institutional nonexistence, which was epitomized in the recent sacking of Prime Minister Ali Zeidan after the infamous  incident.

When militias loaded a North Korean-flagged vessel with crude oil worth $30 million from a rebel-held port, Zeidan's beleaguered government offered tough words but little capacity to impose order. The former prime minister vowed to bomb the tanker — threats that rang hollow in a country of unclear lines of authority and tenuous loyalties.

In his first public  since the dismissal, Zeidan admitted his requests to "prepare a force to take action were ignored" and the military did not carry out his orders. The disheartened premier tried soliciting help from loyal militias, but their limited capacities and "weather conditions" allowed the tanker to escape to sea, throwing the sinking government into further disarray.

While existing international regulations would stop rebels benefiting from the illicitly obtained crude — and since the US Navy SEALs intercepted the tanker and returned it to Libya — the incident became emblematic of the government's contracting reach and growing irrelevance.

International efforts to train and assist the military are built on a problematic premise that Libya operates as a nation-state. Libyan Foreign Minister Mohammed Abdulaziz in  acknowledged that his country "suffers from the inexistence of institutions," which makes it markedly different from Tunisia and Egypt.

Meanwhile, Ambassador to France Alshiabani Mansour Abuhamoud went even further  his country not only failed to inherit "a state in the technical sense of the term," but even "a culture of institutions among people."

Admittedly, Libyan society is bitterly divided, with deep scars left unhealed since the civil war. The state lacks basic attributes of a functioning government, such as a monopoly on violence, resources and popular legitimacy.

The government's glaring inability to follow through on its threats and safeguard the country's resources erodes public trust, which manifested itself starkly in the February 20 constituent assembly poll where only 15% of eligible voters cast ballots.

Lessons From Tunisia

While Libya faces truly formidable challenges in establishing a normally functioning state, it may need to glean lessons from its tiny western neighbor: Tunisia. As chaotic and sporadic as the Tunisian transitional process may have looked, it nevertheless took place within the confines of the political arena.

National disputes were largely solved within the National Constituent Assembly, with differences settled through deliberations and debate. Such a venue is absent in Libya where abundantly available weapons are the primary tools of exerting political influence, while militias employ them copiously to press their demands.

Libya's General National Congress, elected in July 2012, is discredited as a corrupt and inefficient platform for Islamist-leaning militias that even security officers are loathe to protect. When protesters stormed the parliament earlier this month, some  stated that security guards cheered on rioters who shot two deputies.

Libya can look to Tunisia to heed lessons on building an inclusive transitional body that represents minorities and transcends ideological rivalries. The recently elected constitution-drafting body inherently lacks this capacity as it is based on a divisive formula boycotted by the Amazigh and Tebu minorities, who fear the constitution will not protect their rights.

But beyond that, Libya needs a sustained and concerted international effort to help erect a law-governed state from scratch that exercises monopoly on violence and control over resources.

*[This article was originally published by the .]

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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It was only a matter of time before Al-Saadi Qaddafi, the notorious, soccer-obsessed third son of toppled Libyan leader Col. Muammar Qaddafi, would be extradited to Libya by Niger. His trial is likely to shed light on a dark and brutal era in the history of Libyan football.

Saadi was living on borrowed time in Niger, to where he fled after the elite troops he commanded failed in 2011 to foil the popular revolt that overthrew the Qaddafi regime. Saadi’s continued presence in Niger, after a planned exile in Mexico failed to materialize, was an irritant in the country’s increasingly close alliance with the United States and France in the struggle against Islamist militancy in the Sahel and North Africa.

Authorities in Niger, who justified the granting of asylum to Saadi on “humanitarian” grounds, saying they had insufficient guarantees that he would get a fair trial, extradited him despite the fact that Libya’s transitional government has been unable to build a credible, independent judiciary or create a professional military, police force and prison system.

The Libyan attorney general’s office said 41-year-old Saadi faces several charges, including “crimes to keep his father in power”; involvement in the 2005 murder of national team player and Tripoli soccer club coach Bashir al-Ryani, a prominent Qaddafi critic; and “seizing goods by force and intimidation when he headed the Libyan Football Federation” — language Interpol used when it issued, at the request of Libya, a “Red Notice” shortly after the fall of the Qaddafi regime for Saadi.

The Case of Ryani and al-Ahli Benghazi

Ryani was known as player “number nine” because the Qaddafi regime banned the publishing of players’ names, in a bid to ensure they did not become better known than Saadi or Col. Qaddafi himself.

“Two years before he was killed, he told Saadi he was part of a dictatorship and had corrupted Libya. After that he was beaten and left outside his house,” said Hussein Rammali, a former Ryani teammate, at a post-revolt memorial for the late player. Ryani is said to have made his remark at a time when he coached Tripoli’s al-Ahli club, which was owned and captained by Saadi.

The killing of Ryani was but one of a series of soccer-related atrocities under the Qaddafi regime. In a country where the mosque and soccer pitch were the only release valves for pent-up anger and frustration prior to the popular revolt in 2011, Saadi’s association with both the national team and Tripoli’s al-Ahli meant the prestige of the regime was on the line whenever the team played.

As a result, soccer was as much a political match as it was a sports competition in which politics, rather than performance, dictated the outcome.

League matches were fixed to ensure al-Ahli remained on top, in order to prevent a defeat on the pitch from being viewed as a defeat of the regime.

A penalty in an al-Ahli Benghazi match against a team from al-Baydah — the hometown of Saadi’s mother, and the place where the first antigovernment demonstrations against corruption in public housing were staged in 2011 — so outraged Benghazi fans that they invaded the pitch, forcing the game to be abandoned.

A pile of rubble in the eastern city of Benghazi, stands as a sad memorial to the abuse and manipulation of soccer by Middle Eastern and North African autocrats like Saadi, whom the US Embassy in 2009 described as “notoriously ill-behaved.”

The rubble is what is left of Saadi’s efforts to bury the historic club lock, stock and barrel. Its red and white colors were banned from public display. Scores of its supporters were imprisoned, some of whom were sentenced to death for attempting to subvert the Qaddafis’ rule.

The story of al-Ahli Benghazi stands out as a perverted twist of efforts by Middle Eastern leaders like former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the ousted presidents of Yemen, Tunisia and Egypt — Ali Abdullah Saleh, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak — to identify with their national soccer teams in a bid to boost their lingering popularity.

Backed by Saadi, al-Ahli Tripoli blossomed with its financial muscle, which allowed it to buy the best players, and bribe and bully referees and linesmen to rule in its favor.

“I Will Destroy Your Club!”

A little more than a decade ago, al-Ahli fans had enough of Saadi’s subversion of the game. They booed him and his team during a national cup final in front of visiting African dignitaries, while they also dressed up a donkey in the colors of al-Ahli Tripoli. Saadi went ballistic.

“I will destroy your club! I will turn it into an owl’s nest!” The Los Angeles Times quoted Khalifa Binsraiti — then al-Ahli Benghazi’s chairman, who was imprisoned in the subsequent crackdown — as being told by an irate Saadi immediately after the match.

Saadi kept his word. He engineered al-Ahli Benghazi’s relegation to the second division. A referee in a match against Libyan Premier League side al-Akhdar sought to further ensure al-Ahli’s humiliation, by calling a questionable penalty that would have sealed the team’s disgrace.

In response, al-Ahli’s coach confronted the referee, allegedly shoving him. Militant fans stormed the pitch, before the game was suspended and al-Ahli’s fate was sealed.

Al-Ahli fans did not leave it at that. They headed to downtown Benghazi shouting slogans against Saadi, while also burning a likeness of his father and setting fire to the local branch of his national soccer federation.

“I was ready to die that day, I was so frustrated,” The Los Angeles Times quoted 48-year-old businessman Ali Ali, who was among the enraged crowd, as saying. “We were all ready to die.”

It did not take long for Libyan plainclothes security men to respond. Al-Ahli’s 37-hectare clubhouse and facilities were raised to the ground as authorities visited the homes of protesting soccer fans. Some 80 fans were arrested, of whom 30 were put on trial in Tripoli on charges of vandalism, destruction of public property and having contacts with Libyan dissidents abroad — a capital offense in Libya.

Three people were sentenced to death, but their penalties were converted to life in prison by Qaddafi. The prisoners were released after serving five years of their term.

Al-Ahli Benghazi was resurrected in 2004, initially as a second-division team but it later graduated back to the country’s Premier League.

A Pattern of Political Abuse of the Game

The story of al-Ahli is a study in the use of soccer by authoritarian Arab regimes to distract attention from economic and political problems, and of Arab autocrats’ divide and rule approach to governance.

Saadi’s story, like that of the brutal Iraqi sports czar and son of Saddam Hussein, constitutes an extreme example of political abuse of soccer, while it also sheds light on what is mostly a less cruelly executed approach across the Middle East and North Africa.

It is also the untold story of soccer in a swath of land stretching from the Atlantic coast of Africa to the Gulf as a platform of resistance against repression, nepotism and corruption, whose fighters graduated to the front lines of antigovernment protests and continue to press for political change.

*[Note: James M. Dorsey is a Senior Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University. He is also co-director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture, and the author of blog and a forthcoming book with the same title.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Saadi Qaddafi and the Dark History of Libyan Soccer appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Western governments have watched with increasing perplexity as, over the course of the past year, militias stopped the bulk of Libya’s oil production, several regions were engulfed in bitter conflicts, and the political transition in Tripoli ground to a halt. Now the international community prepares for a March 6 conference in Rome to discuss how to stabilize Libya.

The picture is bleak. The government of Prime Minister Ali Zeidan has made no progress on reestablishing the security sector. Instead, local militias have strengthened their position. This allows organized crime and extremist groups to flourish.

In Benghazi, members of the army and the former security apparatus are being assassinated on a daily basis, without anyone having been held to account. The risk of insecurity in Libya spilling over into neighboring countries, or into southern Europe, is likely to grow in the coming years.

In Tripoli, the political climate is increasingly poisoned. Violence has become a routine instrument for exerting political influence, through kidnappings, attacks on media, or blockades of oilfields. While rival camps in the General National Congress (GNC) engage in endless turf wars, the political process has entered a deep crisis of legitimacy. The government has been on edge for months. Only a third of eligible voters had registered for the February 20 elections to the constituent committee, while less than half of those registered turned up. Ethnic minorities boycotted the vote.

The disinterest in the elections betrays a wider loss of confidence in the political process. Evidently, the key power struggles are not being fought in conference halls, but instead in the rivalries over the control of the security sector, borders, and oilfields. The post-revolutionary balance of power is far from settled.

The government is not an actor, but rather a stage for these power struggles. Representatives of individual cities, tribes, business networks, and different Islamist currents each control their respective ministries and public bodies. Many have ties to armed groups. The security sector is a patchwork of units representing particular political interests, and clashes are common. The boundaries between officially sanctioned militias and the army have blurred.

The Dilemma of Western Governments

Western powers had withdrawn after successfully toppling the Muammar Qadhafi regime, hoping that a Libyan-led transition would enjoy broader legitimacy and, therefore, have better prospects for success.

As Libya’s crisis deepened, calls mounted in Western capitals for stronger support to the country. But how do you support a government that isn’t one? How do you assist in rebuilding an army when it has not been decided who will control it?

The international community has no coherent answer to these questions. But that does not stop it from engaging. The US, UK and Italy have embarked on a large-scale training program. All in all, 15,000 recruits are to become soldiers. But nobody knows under whose orders they will be after having undergone training. Prime Minister Zeidan and his defense minister are wrangling with the GNC president and chief of staff over the authority to decide on force deployment.

Until now, the forces that have intervened in conflicts, upon the government’s demand or with its approval, are units that emerged out of the revolutionary armed groups of individual cities. These units can intervene because they have a political basis and clear objectives — contrary to the government.

The government does not lack trained soldiers, but the ability to take decisions and the necessary political backing to impose order. The training program will not change this.

The big topic at the upcoming conference will be initiatives for disarmament and the control of weapons and ammunition stockpiles. There is no doubt that weapons proliferation needs to be addressed urgently. However, will Western governments adopt measures that fit the realities on the ground?

No militia will hand over its arsenal to the government as long as it is not clear whose interests that government represents. A temporary solution would be to hold militias responsible for stockpiles under their control, and entice them to cooperate with the authorities. But such an approach does not lend itself to big announcements at international conferences.

Given widespread desperation over Libya, there are increasing calls for unilateral steps by Western governments. In January, the French Army’s chief of staff thought out loud about the possibility of international intervention in southern Libya. The region’s role as a jihadist sanctuary has been blown out of proportion in the French media for several months now.

But any form of external intervention would trigger broad rejection in Libya, and cause more problems than it would solve. Last October, already, the US-led abduction of al-Qaeda suspect Abu Anas al-Libi from Tripoli nearly brought down the Zeidan government.

In Libya itself, attitudes toward the role of foreign governments are often schizophrenic. Insistent pleas for greater external support to the transition alternate with the deep-rooted conviction that foreign powers are meddling in the country’s many conflicts. Discreet support in the form of advice and expertise is and remains the right approach.

The impression that foreign support is biased toward individual players or camps must be avoided. There are no quick solutions to the chaos in Libya — just some limited opportunities to support a political process that is protracted, unstable and open-ended.

*[This article was originally published by .]

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In recent years, as order in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) eroded between uprisings and armed conflicts, the desire for arms amongst a wide range of actors became one more destabilizing factor in the complexities of each situation.

However, arms proliferation is nothing new to the MENA region. Whether it was through state actors or black market trading, weapons have circulated throughout the Middle East and North Africa for many years.

Today, arms proliferation has taken on a different form as populations have been displaced, forced out, or seen droves of people join movements in conflict areas. The MENA region has become a mélange of different people with different agendas, and some have initiated the need for weapons to advance their mission.

Libya has become an arsenal for conflicts in West Africa and throughout the MENA region, as a wide range of weapons are spread and sold under the auspices of civilians and militias. Yet while it has become general knowledge that militias in Libya have been major actors in the region's arms trade, how they have acquired a large arsenal of sophisticated weapons is rarely spoken about.

In 2011, The Guardian reported on Dan O’Huiggan, who obtained a by European Union (EU) member states to Libya.

As the EU ended an in 2004, €834.5 million worth of weapons were granted to Libya between 2005-2009. In 2009 alone, the EU permitted the export of €343.7 million worth of weapons, with Italy being the top exporter to Libya. While a wide range of weapons were exported to the North African country, some included "chemical or biological toxic agents, 'riot control agents', radioactive materials, related equipment, components and materials."

One of the most complex situations to look at in terms of arms proliferation is the ongoing conflict in Syria, where Libya is just one of the many weapons suppliers to Syrian rebels. Just recently, the United States decided to  to "moderate" rebels after a brief suspension last summer due to "congressional reservations." While the weapons do not include Man-Portable Air-Defense Systems (MANPADs), the delivery does involve small arms and anti-tank rockets.

The suspension of arms deliveries in 2013 was brought about after extremist factions in Syria had acquired American weapons exports. In such a chaotic and lawless atmosphere, how is it possible to monitor the movement and proliferation of arms?

The inability to define Syrian rebels, the role of US arms export, Libya’s unmonitored weapons market, and the intra-national and international movement of peoples have made arms proliferation an increasingly destabilizing factor in the Middle East and North Africa.

51�Թ�'s  speaks to , a senior Middle East analyst at Helios Global, Inc., a risk management group based in Washington DC. Bessler and Zambelis talk about how growing arms proliferation is destabilizing the highly volatile region, including Syria and Egypt.

Julie Bessler: What is the context behind the massive arsenal of weapons that Libya currently has? 

Chris Zambelis: The regime of former Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi amassed a large and diverse military arsenal. Libya’s arsenal served several purposes within the country’s vast security apparatus. Like many autocratic regimes, al-Qaddafi’s Libya operated a network of overlapping and competing security services.

At the same time, Libya’s military strength was augmented by an array of irregular forces based inside as well as outside its borders, including nomadic Tuareg tribes, foreign mercenaries and other loose militant outfits strewn across Africa.

Despite arms embargoes, Libya was a major destination for arms exporters. Libya’s oil wealth enabled it to purchase billions of dollars in weapons from a diverse range of suppliers, including Russia, China, Italy, France, Britain, Belgium and many other European countries. In addition to its massive stock of Soviet-era weapons, the regime also imported vast quantities of small arms, ammunition, battle tanks, armored vehicles, military fighter aircrafts, combat helicopters, land mines, rockets and missiles.

The regime, unsurprisingly, had also pursued a nuclear weapons program but later gave them up in exchange for better relations with Western powers and the removal of economic sanctions.

The scale of Libya’s armaments must also be considered in the context of its foreign policy. Al-Qaddafi promulgated a variety of ideologies over the years that served to project Libyan power and influence.

At one point, Libya even stood with leftist-oriented political and militant movements in Central America and the Caribbean. The al-Qaddafi regime provided support to numerous militant and insurgent movements around the globe through financial largesse, training, political and ideological support, and also provisions of arms.                                     

Bessler: What did arms proliferation in the MENA region look like before the Arab Spring and what has changed since?

Zambelis: In the context of recent developments, the most pressing issue in my view involves the spread of small arms and light weapons (SALW). Black and gray markets for SALW have always existed in the MENA region.

However, what is different now is the scale and nature of the arms trade. Until recently, practically all of the states in the MENA region were under different forms of authoritarian rule. In most cases, this generally translated into highly repressive police states that operated centralized and overbearing security apparatuses. 

As a result, the proliferation of arms, including SALW, tended to be localized and was often heavily circumscribed by state actors. There is also the issue of separatism, political and religious militancy, and transnational organized crime; but again, these issues tended to be generally confined to narrow geographic spaces.

The climate of popular revolt and the breakdown of order have enabled the spread of SALW. Countries experiencing severe instability such as Libya are flooding the market with SALW. Alarmingly, the breakdown of order has created a new demand for these weapons as the politics of transitioning countries in MENA is increasingly being played out in violent clashes. At the same time, traditional sources of illicit arms, including European organized criminal networks, are finding new customers around the region. 

Bessler: How are weapons from Libya infiltrating Egypt and other countries?

Zambelis: A quick look at Libya’s proximity to Egypt and a consideration of the broader regional geography and demographics help explain the arms trafficking flows from Libya.

Libya’s borders are highly porous and easily breached by established smuggling networks. The border dividing Libya and Egypt is sparsely populated and prone to smuggling. Not surprisingly, the breakdown of order in Libya and political instability in Egypt, and elsewhere in the region, has impacted the flow of SALW and other contraband. An increase of demand for weapons in Egypt, particularly the Sinai Peninsula, and other regions that are witnessing a rise in violence is also luring smugglers from Libya and elsewhere to meet local demands.

Bessler: What are the dangers of arms proliferation in the MENA region? What negative effects have they had? 

Zambelis: In my opinion, the rapid spread of SALW is a very serious concern. Given their relative accessibility, low cost, ease of use and large supply, the proliferation of SALW from a place such as Libya can wreak havoc on entire societies, countries and regions. Libyan caches of SALW have already served to fuel the fighting in Syria as well as Mali, Niger, Tunisia, Chad, Algeria and Egypt.

The availability of SALW has also served to militarize nascent political movements while bolstering the arsenals of armed militias attempting to carve out their own niches in countries undergoing political transitions. Violent street gangs in urban centers around the globe are increasingly able to access these kinds of weapons.

I think it is plausible that violent street gangs and drug trafficking cartels in Latin America and the Caribbean will get their hands on Libyan SALW. Moreover, SALW are usually extremely difficult to track. This makes them ideal for a wide variety of illegal violent activities.

Bessler: What efforts has the international community undertaken so far?

Zambelis: The arms trade in general is a huge business and this includes the trade in SALW. Many of the world’s most vocal proponents of counter-proliferation, including Western countries, are at the same time the biggest beneficiaries of the global arms trade, and this includes the production and export of these weapons.

At the same time, there are ongoing efforts and campaigns by NGOs and civil society advocacy groups to address the issue. The United Nations Global Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) is one example that specifically addresses the issue of better regulating the trade and transfer of conventional arms, including SALW, using internationally agreed-upon guidelines.  

Bessler: How has the situation worsened in post-war Libya? 

Zambelis: No country, let alone Libya in its current fragile state, can consolidate a political transition without some semblance of law and order. Libya remains fractious and violent and its central government is very weak.

Competing factions, often based in or around major population centers reflecting rival power bases such as those in Tripoli in the west and Benghazi in the east, are able to solidify their positions in relation to the other or the central government when they are heavily armed. These factions are vying for a place in the new Libya or are possibly even carving their own niche, independent of the central authorities.

This is a natural consequence of political transitions from authoritarianism. But the problem is that many of these factions continue to operate as insurgent detachments, in addition to fielding political parties and organizations. Many of these factions looted Libyan arms bases and weapons caches and now have access to enormous amounts of SALW. Some of these factions may agree in principle to the need to enshrine a viable social and political order based on established law and institutions, but they are not prepared to lay down their arms. Rivalries between opposing political and ideological currents that should normally be contested in a civil manner are instead being decided in violent street clashes, assassinations and terrorist attacks.

The abduction of Libyan Prime Minister Ali Zaidan last October by a local militia is a testament to how bad things are in the country. The influence of militias has also devastated Libya’s vital oil sector. According to some estimates, Libya’s exports are down over 90% as a result of the violence. The Libyan government has entertained the possibility of integrating militias into the regular security services, essentially co-opting them, but this is easier said than done. Crime is also rampant.

All of these factors undermine Libya’s prospects for peace and stability. The current climate has also vastly deterred foreign investors.

Bessler: Calls for arming the Syrian rebels to topple Assad will be replicating post-war Libya; how can such a problem be dealt with?

Zambelis: Despite all of the crimes committed by the Ba’athist regime prior to and during the uprising in Syria, it is important to keep in mind that radical Islamists and an assortment of other dangerous actors beholden to foreign interests dominate the insurgency. The solution in Syria will have to revolve around some sort of negotiated pact between the belligerent actors.

By all accounts, this is where Syria appears to be heading. 

*[Note: The opinions expressed here are the interviewee's alone and do not necessarily reflect the position of Helios Global, Inc.]

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Of the proposals for dealing with the expiring mandate of the General National Congress (GNC) and rectifying the larger political problems which have propelled Libya’s transition down its current trajectory, Dr. Mustafa Abu-Shagour’s “” is perhaps the most high-profile and comprehensive solution.

Acclimatizing Libya to Democracy

Labeling the current authorities as incapable of stopping Libya’s slide into instability, Abu-Shagour advocated that the constitutional declaration be amended under a referendum to provide for an elected head of state and parliament of 200, ruling until June 2016. This initiative is argued from the position that a longer time-period is needed to acclimatize Libya to democracy and, therefore, allow for a more informed constitutional drafting process.

The success of this initiative’s implementation will depend on its details, how far it goes in describing a separation of powers, providing national goals to work with, creating a transitional justice system, and limiting the destructive aspects of pluralistic politics from making a return.

Quiet, but increasingly louder voices have begun to call for an international body (such as the United Nations or the African Union) to enter, keep the peace, and manage Libya’s political progression.

Whilst the best-practice procedures of international bodies could help condition Libya’s institutions toward democratic governance, foreign troops on Libya’s soil would be a controversial step. Hence, such a decision should not be taken without painstaking forethought.

A regulation on using Arab or Muslim members of these bodies could quell the potential for calls against this decision as a neocolonial endeavor. However, a transparent legal framework would need to be in place to provide clear, mutually agreed rules for the situation’s management and operational mandate.

Moreover, clear rules of engagement and the provision of recourse to those who believe they or their property suffered unfairly during any conflicts would be a necessity for such a decision to gain public approval.

Additionally, foreign states involved in such an endeavor would have to give their own authorization; no light decision considering the numerous risks involved, especially if any of their nationals should provoke controversy.

This lesson was already learned by the US, as it failed to reach an agreement for their troops to remain in post-war Iraq while also facing similar difficulties with the Afghanistan withdrawal.

Overall, this would need to be a decision Libya makes through a national referendum in order to ensure public support, as it is a difficult process to roll-back once enacted. If done without consensual approval, it could prove to be a disastrous step.

The GNC and Public Legitimacy

The GNC itself has also entered this debate, announcing that the February 2014 deadline only referred to producing a new constitution and not an end to its mandate.

GNC members recently voted for provisions to ensure their continuity until December 24, 2014, an attempt to preserve their right to rule, until they have delivered a constitution as per the mandate under the Constitutional Declaration.

However, the largest issue with this initiative was never going to be the legality of the GNC’s rule, but rather its public legitimacy. The deep disregard with which a majority of people hold their current authorities has removed them from consideration in many day-to-day issues and even crises, as people become increasingly self-reliant or use traditional social mechanisms (like tribal or elders councils) to solve their problems.

Libyan people have clearly lost their faith in both the government and the GNC and, whilst it is not impossible, it would take a profound effort for them to regain the public’s trust and support; especially given the high number of divisively controversial personalities who remain prominent members of these bodies.

Nevertheless, if the GNC can prove to the people that it has learned from its mistakes, show semblances of progress, and outline a more detailed roadmap than is currently on offer for what it means to achieve in the next year, the proposal to extend its rule would offer the smoothest option available.

In the current climate of political instability, not having to handle a transfer of power could only be beneficial for Libya, as it embarks on what will be a very difficult endeavor to correct the direction of the country’s development.

At the End of the Day…

In the search for a solution to the intricate issues infecting Libya’s transition, it is important to ensure that the symptoms are not prescribed for over the illness.

Due to the various experiences of different regions since the end of the revolution, Libya has developed disparately. Each region has its own entrenched ideologies and pressing concerns.

There is a danger that the forces which molded the GNC’s era could very well push 200 freshly elected politicians down the same path. This is why it is vital that any move for change be accompanied with a vision for what that change entails.

The success of any upcoming change will depend upon the political procedures, regulations, and enforcement mechanisms in place for the next set of politicians. Strong procedures, true transparency, and enforceable accountability systems are the most effective block against a resurrection of previous corruption and mismanagement.

A vision is needed to restore hope to the people. Short-term goals and long-term targets create an atmosphere of constant anticipation, in contrast to the current chaos.

Such an atmosphere simultaneously creates continual pressure for the authorities to deliver results, combat complacency, and conditions politicians into working for and being responsible to the public. Similarly, this vision needs to be national and inclusive in its scope whilst aware of the limitations that Libya’s context demands.

A national vision is needed to rebuff regionalization, and by its very nature it necessitates some form of unification. Such a vision is centered on commonly identifiable goals that exclude ideology, and are unifying both in its shared ambition and the shared work needed to realize this ambition.

If any plan is to be national, then by definition it must also be inclusive. There are common problems that every group faces regardless of their ideology, such as trash disposal, maintenance or use of national infrastructure.

Such apolitical needs can be prioritized over grander national projects and yield benefits through providing that first experience of what cooperative work entails and how it can be mutually beneficial.

Furthermore, small victories which can deliver immediate improvements to people’s environment create a positive atmosphere that can drive further change. The power of confidence and momentum to a country’s political progress, whilst not tangible, is something which should not be underestimated.

Such a vision is eminently achievable and not outside the country’s current grasp, removing the overwhelming effect that Libya’s wealth of institutionalized problems can have on those in office. After all, the current authorities are, by their title, transitional and thus are supposed to only manage the country whilst the fundamental questions over its future are decided upon.

Therefore, Libya’s leaders should be prioritizing returning the country to its physical pre-war standard, whilst preparing the political platform to hand over to the nation’s first constitutional government. It will then be that government’s goal to decide and design the future development, structure, economy and nature of the Libyan state.

Any nation’s political health is the direct result of preceding events which culminate to set its political trajectory, a variable usually tied to two factors: the authorities’ operational competence and the public’s confidence in them; and the short-term future of the state. Whilst both of these are unquestionably low at this current time, the paths that nations travel are characterized by opportunities for change which routinely present themselves.

These opportunities are systemic and managed in democracies, usually under the guise of elections, whereas other states require outside pressures, be they from the population or the sudden realization that an unsustainable system is unable to continue further without support.

In Libya, these two types are presenting themselves simultaneously, while the country’s different political forces prepare for the next opportunity to change its current trajectory. Whichever path is chosen, it will have to be embarked upon in an inclusive, transparent and planned manner if it is to truly begin to right the course of the revolution.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Libya is sliding deeper into instability. The joyous and hopeful atmosphere which encircled the 2012 elections for a transitional parliament – the General National Congress (GNC) – and their initial months in office has dissipated with depression and destitution replacing them.

At the head of this progression is a political system paralyzed by its own factionalism; one whose mismanagement has helped create the current scenario. Libya's oil terminals — its main source of revenue — remain closed whilst the state’s coffers are being cleansed by corruption. Politically disgruntled groups are engaging in ominous acts of civil disobedience and emboldened militias have brought destruction and differing dilemmas to each region.

As this new reality becomes painfully clearer, the need for both short- and long-term solutions escalates and a groundswell of pressure arises to add shape to the demands for change. The , designed by the National Transitional Council (NTC) — the GNC’s predecessor — which is supposed to be Libya’s transitional roadmap and constitution, has been the official underpinning to this period of Libyan politics.

With its timeline for producing a constitution ending on February 7, 2014, many people now recognize this date as the end of the GNC's political legitimacy. Therefore, it is around this event that many of the debates over Libya’s future have fallen under the informal slogan of "correcting the course of the revolution."

Given the seriousness of Libya's current problems, the answer to the question of "what comes next?" is perhaps the most vital to Libya's future since 2011.

Libya's Political Path

The Constitutional Declaration created the GNC as Libya's ultimate authority, but failed to provide any details for how they were to rule, except for mandating them to appoint a transitional government and Constitutional Assembly (CA).

In addition, the declaration failed to establish a clear separation of powers; a flaw exploited by GNC members to exercise authority over their elected prime minister, Ali Zeidan, and the executive branch of Libya's transitional authorities.

Thus, being the center of Libya's political system, the GNC — a 200-member parliament filled through the country's first fair, if not confused, national elections — naturally became the point of projection for Libya's regional and ideological groups to take their cause national.

Libya's politicians have little experience of operating in democratic environments whereby problems are discussed until a reasoned consensus is reached, nor in their role as a representative of their communities.

Without any regulation to foster this mindset, the old view of political positions as seats of power and influence, dictatorial governance styles, and zero-sum political games have flourished upon a platform of patronage rather than representation. 

This was a problem worsened through the absence of defined roles and responsibilities for political offices and a national vision under which to work. It eventually coalesced to create an environment which seconded consensual national progress to short-term political games, with different factions jostling for power.

Political initiatives, national bodies, and Libya's treasury were reduced to pawns in a game for increased influence rather than as complementary tools with which to develop the state.

Political Paralysis

Thus, Libya’s first fairly elected parliament gradually became the base from which factions could manipulate the other arms of the Libyan state to further their own ambitions. 

This resurrection of the old mindset rendered the new system unable to solve problems it encountered, as factions fought to glorify their own solutions rather than enact a cooperative system. Consequently, it created the popular perception that GNC members are the nation's decisive power-holders.

This political paralysis allowed problems to fester into national crises, illustrated through the oil strike's progression from its start in early 2012 to the complete shutdown of all  — which is still in force today.

It is also exemplified by the growth of the Eastern Federalist Movement, whose support was polled at just 12% in the east in early 2013. However, since then it has co-opted the oil strikes to control Libya's core revenue stream and announced its own government in the eastern Cyrenaica province.

This inaction of the official political process forced pressure groups into more coercive forms of lobbying. As the authorities continuously wilted under confrontation, these groups grew more emboldened, advancing from threats to , , and even withholding  from the capital in order to extort their demands.

Militias and the Return of the Old Regime's Agents

This opaque and broken system was the propagator of two damaging phenomena. The economic agents of the old regime were able to expand their holdings and privileges to an unprecedented degree.

They claimed ownership over the state industries and import markets they previously managed and leveraged connections within the new system to tap the state's coffers through mismanaged tenders; all whilst using personal militias to intimidate opposition.

Political factions also recognized the usefulness of militias in the new order as the optimal tool for political advancement, employing them to intimidate opponents and enhance influence or control at politically sensitive moments, while ignoring the cost that each deployment levied from the state's stability.

These militias had ballooned since the end of the revolution and so were able to consistently meet the growing demand for their services. Many disillusioned youth signed up for the impressive remuneration package, whilst scores of ex-fighters, broken-out fugitives, and the criminally minded joined for the protective camaraderie and ability to operate with impunity. 

Certain factions avoided public outrage by engaging their respective media entities to wrap their militia's actions around a revolutionary narrative, which resonated emotionally with a large segment of the population.

However, this tactic is now faltering, as militia violence and general criminality have pushed the population into repeated protests against them and, at times, the political factions who back them.

By presiding over a system that could tangibly offer little in the way of hope, development, or plans for future growth and stabilization, government authorities were forced into using salary increases and cash hand-outs to pacify a population expectantly awaiting the physical and economic development they had endured war for.

This has had disastrous effects, building a pattern of high costs that could bankrupt the country by 2018 (if current expenditure rates continue) and forcing disillusioned political groups to act outside of the official system and in ever more extreme ways as they seek recognition for their message.

Powerful Shadow Forces

Moreover, the entrenchment of opportunistically criminal actors throughout Libya has rendered a powerful shadow force and network of incentives. They are working to prevent the emergence of any systems of security, accountability or transparency, which would dissolve their power base, newly secured privileges, and possibly end in their criminal prosecution. 

In contrast, the few remaining politicians who hold a national agenda point to the constitution — which is the final goal of the Constitutional Declaration's transitional agenda — as Libya's savior.

Operating under a self-proclaimed tunnel-vision, they are consciously ignoring the problems littering Libya’s path forward under a belief that once a constitution is ratified these problems will be eminently more solvable. Regardless of the soundness of their beliefs, it is doubtful that the population's patience will last that long.

As multiple national crises reach an overwhelming level, anecdotal evidence of massive corruption pours unrelentingly into the public consciousness.

Moreover, the uncertainty derived from a worsening security situation and an almost absent state causes fear, cynicism, and a feeling of helplessness amongst the population. Demands for the removal of the current authorities grow louder and are becoming less negotiable with each passing day.

Common Calls for Change

As Libya's problems worsened in the latter half of 2013, possible solutions to particular problems were reared by political groups, the UN's support mission, and even advocacy groups and concerned citizens.

September 2013 was ushered in under the watchwords of "national reconciliation," as official recognition was finally paid to Libya's increasing regionalization. Having originated during the localized warfare of the revolution, this problem has deepened because of un-resolved issues between neighboring localities and siege mentalities stemming from the instability and lack of development blamed on the central government.

These are underpinned by severe political and social issues, such as cities essentially functioning as independent entities, whole communities living in squalid refugee camps for the past three years and now becoming increasingly embittered against the new state, and strings of violent conflicts between neighboring localities which have their roots in the revolution.

In turn, these issues only feed back into the regionalization and environment of fear and distrust which propagate Libya's crises.

Whilst the recognition of these problems' seriousness was welcomed, the flaws in Libya's transitional politics shone through yet again as three competing initiatives by the prime minister’s office, the GNC, and the largest political party — the National Forces Alliance — were publically announced within a week.

All three are trying to create a national talking forum for Libya's various factions, in an attempt to create consensual principles for future progress; but of course under their entities' banner for political gain.

Throughout September and October 2013, more drastic solutions arose from a population increasingly convinced that Libya's transitional problems can only be truly solved through removing their transitional authorities.

A New Role for the Constitutional Assembly?

As the Constitutional Assembly elections at the end of February draw closer, many have started to call for the CA to take on the role of the GNC and to draft the constitution. Although this is a popular idea, a lot of groundwork would need to be done to make it feasible.

Not only would the timeline for the constitution’s drafting process need to be extended, but a legal basis for their rule would need to be agreed upon. This would necessitate an amendment to the constitutional declaration, which would endow the CA with the GNC's powers.

Furthermore, given the inexperience of Libya's politicians, it could be overwhelming for them to conduct two such important jobs simultaneously and to the high level of attention which both deserve.

Other groups have simply called for a reelection of the GNC to take place alongside the CA elections. A slight amendment to the Constitutional Declaration's timeline and an article concerning the GNC would be the requirements to legally legitimate such a move.

However, the effort to hold another round of elections alongside the CA's would be taxing with the already delayed election date looming. Furthermore, the question of how to manage the country whilst the authorities are a "lame duck" would need resolution.

Finally, it is worth considering whether the year's worth of experience lost through replacing the GNC wholesale will be equal to the benefits gained from fresh personnel operating under the same system. This is especially the case since it is a solution which fails to influence the procedural problems of Libya’s transition.

*[Read the on February 14.]

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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In 2009, African leaders met in Addis Ababa to declare 2009-2018 as the "." Despite rhetoric promising to mobilize resources to help spur human development and curb unemployment, there has been limited progress on integrating youth into society’s most formidable institution: the statehouse.

Today, Africa has the largest youth population in the world with . Despite the huge population growth among the continent’s youth, the average age of an African president is around 63-years-old.

In late January, took to the streets of Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso to protest against proposed changes to the constitution that would allow President Blaise Compaoré to run for another term in 2015. Opposition leaders organized a national day of protest to demand that Compaoré steps down in lieu of making revisions to presidential term limits. Currently, the country's constitution limits presidents to two five-year terms.

President Compaoré came to power in 1987 following a coup. After serving two seven-year terms, the constitution was changed in 2000, allowing him to serve two additional five-year terms. Under the stipulations of the current constitution, his term is set to end next year.

The recent protests in Burkina Faso are merely emblematic of many African leaders’ refusal to turn over power to a new generation that is crying out for recognition and support. However, Compaoré is not alone in his long run at the top. Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni has been in power for over 28 years; Cameroon’s Paul Biya for 32 years; Zimbabwe’s infamous Robert Mugabe for 34 years; and José Eduardo Dos Santos of Angola and Teodoro Obiang of Equatorial Guinea for 35 years each.

A Recipe for Instability

Although many of the aforementioned leaders were once heralded as revolutionary heroes to their people, they have since become old men enamored with the trappings of power. Many African leaders are often deluded into thinking they have the hearts of their people.

However, in claiming to love and act in the best interest of their nations, these leaders may do more harm than good. A one-man regime, built on a simulacrum of a functional civil service, is a recipe for disaster when that leader leaves. The tenuous relationships that he has built through lining the pockets of his supporters or by using force will shatter, leaving either a power vacuum or a splintered state.

Nowhere has this been clearer than in the case of Ivory Coast in the 1990s when the death of President Houphouët-Boigny turned the country upside down. As a result, Ivory Coast struggled to maintain peace. Its fragmented political relations in the wake of Houphouët-Boigny's may have been a major factor in the 1999 coup and, ultimately, the Ivorian Civil War.The risk that we might witness a future crop of unstable states after the death or fall of one of these aging autocrats is high.

The gap between the leadership and the people has become a growing source of contention as one might see in the recent uproar over Francis Muthaura’s appointment in Kenya. As a former member of the Kibaki administration, Muthaura’s appointment as the head of a multibillion-dollar rail, road, and port project in Lamu alienated local people who demanded a fresh face to spearhead the project. In Kenya, the flames of anger may have dissipated, but we must seriously consider circumstances in which they might burn unabated.

In Burkina Faso, we may be seeing the seeds of a disgruntled youth movement akin to the events of the Arab Spring in which a young population, frustrated with unemployment and autocracy, fought for more democratic representation and economic participation.

Like the aging Sub-Saharan gerontocracy, North African leaders were markedly older than the citizens of their countries. Hosni Mubarak was 82 at the time of his ouster, while the median age in Egypt is around 30. Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi was similarly much older than the average Libyan. As the youth population in Africa continues to explode, it is likely that discontent with aging autocrats will grow unless action is taken now.

Time for Change

Local communities must push for the revitalization of democracy through the enforcement of presidential term limits and a balance of power. By establishing a tradition of smooth transfers of power between candidates truly chosen by the people, citizens have a greater chance of ensuring that their interests are represented.

However, in urging the gerontocracy to abdicate its de-facto throne, it must also be ensured that African nations do not suffer due to a limited pool of qualified candidates. To overcome these potential shortcomings, the international community must continue its support of improving education and building capacity in the developing world.

As we lie in the midst of an African Renaissance and a global boom in technology, the possibilities to rapidly accelerate opportunities for citizens to improve their education and make the leap towards public service are endless. There are hundreds clamoring at the door to make their voices heard. It is time to let them in.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Once again, Tunisia is now considered to be the democratic frontrunner in the Arab world as well as the last remaining hope of the Arab Spring. Its new constitution, passed by the National Constituent Assembly on January 26, is unparalleled in terms of political and religious freedoms, the relationship between religion and politics, and gender equality.

Perhaps even more importantly, the small North African country exemplifies how a national dialogue process, backed by persistent civil society intermediaries and international support, can reach a consensus on the fundamentals of a new political system even in a highly polarized society.

In a region where political conflict is usually "solved" by force or repression, Tunisia impressively demonstrates that the process of negotiation might be tough, however, it is bound to produce more democratic and presumably more sustainable results.

The people and regimes in the entire Arab world will keep an eye on Tunisia. The people because they consider the country to be a role model, and the rulers because they see their power being threatened by the first real Arab alternative to their own authoritarian systems.

At the same time, the positive developments in the Tunisian democratization process are a direct result of the negative developments in other states of the region, namely Egypt, Libya, and Syria.

Learning a Lesson from Egypt

The removal of former Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi in July 2013 and the following repression of the Muslim Brotherhood acted as a wake-up call for key political actors in Tunisia. This is particularly true for the Islamist Ennahda — the dominant party in the previous government coalition.

Ennahda, throughout its history, has always been more progressive and tolerant in its vision of political and social order as opposed to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Still, the Ennahda-led government made efforts to Islamize the social sphere and sought to enshrine Islam as the state religion in the constitution.

After Morsi’s removal, representatives of Ennahda publicly expressed their concern over a similar development in their own country. As a result, the party learnt a lesson from events in Egypt. Ennahda engaged seriously in the national dialogue process and showed a surprising willingness to compromise as the constitution was drafted.

What is more, Ennahda – due to the pressure from the street and the parliamentary opposition – declared that it would resign in the national interest to make room for a "caretaker government" until the next elections, which is expected to take place in autumn 2014. Notably, the party kept its word and stood down.

Thus, for the first time in the Arab world, an Islamist-dominated government which rose to power through elections had relinquished its role at the top..

The Tunisian opposition has also learnt lessons from Egypt. At first, the opposition felt encouraged to call for the toppling of the Islamist-led government. However, the bloody confrontations in Egypt convinced key opposition figures, such as former Prime Minister Beji Caid Essebsi, to enter direct and serious dialogue with the leader of Ennahda, Rachid Ghannouchi.

Moreover, the rise of Jihadist groups in Libya, the Sahel region, and Syria had an impact on Tunisia’s domestic political process. Initially, the Ennahda government more or less turned a blind eye to potentially militant Tunisian Salafis. Also, no obstacles were put in the way of young Tunisians departing for Syria to join the battle there.

Yet Ennahda again – even if hesitantly – drew its lessons from homegrown militants’ linking up with international Jihadi actors and engaging in violent attacks against Tunisian security forces. The Islamist Ennahda party dissociates itself explicitly from the potentially militant Salafi camp. Classifying the Salafist group Ansar al-Sharia as a terrorist organization in August 2013 was but one example of the government’s new strategy.

The increasing anarchy in Libya, where weapons circulate freely and Jihadists can move undisturbed, further reinforced the readiness for dialogue between the government and the opposition in Tunisia.

While Libya continues to gradually fall apart, Tunisia’s political elite as well as important social forces have become acutely aware that only by standing together will they be strong enough to face the challenges of building solid state institutions in a difficult regional environment.

Egypt's Impact on Morocco and Algeria

Apart from Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria have also drawn lessons from the events in Egypt, although not necessarily in the sense of democratization. For example, the Moroccan king has used the events in Egypt to weaken the Islamist ruling party, the Justice and Development Party (PJD), through a cabinet reshuffle. The PJD, probably with an eye on Egypt, has accepted this more or less without complaining.

In Algeria, the Muslim Brotherhood criticized the reception of the new Egyptian foreign minister. But, even though they have decided to boycott the upcoming Algerian presidential elections in April, their oppositional rhetoric in the domestic sphere is subdued these days. With Algeria's civil war in the 1990s, Islamists have a strong interest in demarcating themselves from their violent "brothers."

Such political learning processes are not new. But thanks to Facebook, Twitter, and the intense media coverage of pan-Arab television stations, the Arab public is informed about events in other states faster and better than ever before. This has increased the pressure on political elites to act. Lessons have to be drawn faster – this can be an opportunity, as Tunisia has shown.

Of course, it cannot be assumed that political actors will follow Tunisia's lead or the wider region's developments — that of which are considered to be the "right" ones from a Western democracy-orientated perspective.

But particularly for Western (foreign) policy actors, it is important to act in accordance with these fast learning and adaptable processes. In the short-run, the Tunisian way may not be an export hit.

However, if Arab populations, for instance in Egypt, see that democratization in Tunisia continues to progress thanks to the inclusive national dialogue and that such progress leads to substantial European support for the economy, this may in the medium-term act as an incentive to pursue the path of dialogue.

*[This article was originally published by , and translated from German to English by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has long been a champion for the establishment of a Nuclear Weapons Free Zone in the Middle East, owing to a combination of its isolation from immediate and existential external threats and its ability to procure and field relatively large quantities of the most sophisticated conventional weaponry on the planet.

Since the Joint Plan of Action with Iran was signed, Saudi Arabia has exhibited unusual behavior such as a willingness to cooperate with its arch nemesis, Israel, and openly defy its strongest ally, the United States, in protesting the easing of sanctions against Iran.

Though the US-led negotiations are intended to ultimately persuade the Iranians to halt their pursuit of a nuclear weapon and prevent a regional nuclear arms race, Saudi Arabia and guardedly accepts that easing sanctions and other confidence building measures may be a

This ex post facto display of confidence in diplomatic solutions raises the question over whether or not Saudi Arabia truly believes the Iranian quest for a nuclear weapon can be stopped, as well as Riyadh’s preparations to counter the Iranian nuclear arsenal.

provides an avenue for short-term procurement of a nuclear weapon. However, recent education initiatives by King Abdullah — providing legions of the best and brightest young Saudi scientists and engineers training at world-class institutions abroad — allow for the possibility of a long-term nuclear weapons program in the kingdom itself.

Saudi Arabia’s consistent position as the world’s largest single producer of oil could grant the kingdom immunity from potential sanctions, similar to those facing Iran. This is especially the case if the world supply of oil is already hampered by existing sanctions on another major producer.

The Saudi Motivation to Pursue the Nuclear Option

In 2009, King Abdullah initially warned US Special Envoy to the Middle East Dennis Ross that “” if Iran crosses the threshold. This threshold set by King Abdullah four years ago is largely unknown.

However, recent actions by the kingdom to include the unprecedented denial of a seat at the UN Security Council and unmitigated support for Sunni fighters against Iranian proxies in Syria and Lebanon are direct affronts to all parties outside of the region. It is an indicator of Saudi Arabia’s lack of confidence in its traditional allies to provide protection and exert authority in the Middle East.

In a statement explaining its rejection of the seat as a non-permanent member of the Security Council, the in Washington cited:

“…the failure of the Security Council to make the Middle East a free zone of all weapons of mass destruction… [and] allowing the ruling regime in Syria to kill and burn its people by the chemical weapons, while the world stands idly, without applying deterrent sanctions against the Damascus regime… [as] irrefutable evidence and proof of the inability of the Security Council to carry out its duties and responsibilities.”

This announcement from October 18, 2013, came just two days after the 40th anniversary of the 1973 Arab Oil Boycott initiated by the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries, which was intended to punish the US and other Western nations for their support of Israel during the Yom Kippur War.

Forty years ago, the US was highly vulnerable to the “oil weapon” as environmental groups pressured the federal government to cut domestic production in sensitive areas. The quadrupling of gasoline prices and a series of unpopular energy conservation methods put the US on a fast-track towards achieving energy independence.

Energy security has always been the foundation of the US-Saudi relationship, which has frayed in recent years given an explosion in US domestic production thanks to the “unlocking” of massive oil and gas reservoirs in the recent shale revolution.

The combination of this increase in US domestic production and efforts to conserve energy has diminished the importance of a strong relationship between Washington and Riyadh. Despite US Secretary of State John Kerry’s reassurances of American commitment to maintaining a strong and mutually beneficial relationship between the two nations, he continues to express optimism towards negotiations with Iran.

This prompted former Director of General Intelligence Prince Turki al-Faisal to express doubt in the outcome of an “,” while former Saudi Ambassador to the US and current Director of General Intelligence Prince Bandar bin Sultan threatened a “” in relations with Washington.

Such a shift has the potential to prevent the US, the primary supplier of the Saudi Ministry of Defense and Aviation, from selling sophisticated conventional weapons to the Saudis. Cutting off the supply of such weapons to Saudi Arabia would further emphasize their need to obtain a nuclear weapon to deter Iranian aggression.

Saudi Capability to Develop or Procure a Nuclear Weapon

Traditionally, Saudi Arabia has never had much potential to develop or procure a nuclear weapon due to its lack of motivation and capability. King Abdullah’s 2009 vow and Saudi Arabia’s lack of confidence in the provides the kingdom with motivation to explore several short-term and long-term avenues available today, due to stronger foreign relations with nuclear states and a bolstered education program to obtain a nuclear insurance policy.

Saudi Arabia has a long-standing relationship with nuclear-armed Pakistan and has made significant investments in the Pakistani nuclear program over the years.

Gary Samore, President Barack Obama’s former counter-proliferation advisor, that the Saudi investment in the Pakistani nuclear program led “the Saudis [to] believe that they have some understanding with Pakistan that, in extremis, they would have claim to acquire nuclear weapons from Pakistan.”

Pakistan denies this charge, to be “a responsible nuclear weapon state with robust command and control structures and comprehensive export controls.” Though Pakistan may officially have little incentive to either provide nuclear weapons to Saudi Arabia or deploy them in Saudi territory, there exists the possibility for unofficial leaks of know-how or material from the Pakistani nuclear program to support a Saudi initiative.

Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, who played a key role in the development of the Pakistani nuclear program, was accused of selling nuclear secrets and equipment to Libya and North Korea. He was subsequently fired by the Pakistani government in 2004 and placed under house arrest until February 2009. The large financial resources available to Saudi Arabia allow access to this avenue of unofficial procurement.

These underhanded attempts at proliferation may prove to be unnecessary for the Saudis in the long-run, given their recent attempts at developing a new generation of highly educated scientists and public desire for a civilian nuclear program.

King Abdullah, seeking to transform the Saudi economy from the “rentier model” dependent on energy exports to a centrally planned economy with an emphasis on technology and innovation, has granted more than 47,000 of the best and brightest Saudi students the opportunity to pursue advanced degrees in hard sciences and engineering at world-class institutions all over the globe.

This upcoming generation of foreign-educated scientists and engineers, combined with Saudi efforts to import foreign students and professors to stimulate such research within the kingdom at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, are intended to usher in an era of new energy to counter the unsustainable growth in domestic energy consumption that threatens the kingdom’s exports.

The Saudi civilian nuclear program, scheduled to be fully operational by 2032, is among the proposed sources of energy. Prince Turki al-Faisal claimed in a that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia recognizes the right of the Iranians to develop a civilian nuclear program as the Saudis are doing.

However, he also expresses concern about the foundation that a civilian nuclear program provides for the development of a nuclear weapon, an argument which can also be applied to the Saudi civilian nuclear program.

Deal or No Deal?

The uncompromising Saudi opposition to negotiations with Iran to ease sanctions in return for the slowing of their nuclear program is not based on a long-term goal to prevent Tehran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, but their short-term goal of keeping sanctions in place to hinder Iranian sponsorship of proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen.

The Joint Plan of Action signed on November 24, 2013, makes no mention of Iranian proxy operations throughout the region. The token amount of sanction relief, approximately 5% according to Kerry, would allow Iran to bolster these proxy operations throughout the region to the detriment of Saudi Arabia with both the resources freed from sanctions and the cessation of expensive enrichment activities over the next six months.

A second round of Geneva talks focusing on quelling the uncontrolled violence in Syria, a major hotbed of Iranian paramilitary activity and proxy support of Bashar al-Assad, began on January 22, .

If the and on both sides of the Joint Plan of Action continues and Iran resumes its pursuit of a nuclear weapon despite the looming sanctions, Saudi Arabia will have the green light to embark on its own program.

Although the US is becoming more energy independent, the rapidly expanding energy demands of countries such as China are not and simultaneous sanctions on Iran and Saudi Arabia are unlikely to be supported by the countries dependent on oil imports.

Sanctions on both Saudi Arabia and Iran, respectively the , would remove an estimated 10.7 million barrels per day from the world supply —

The perception of an existential threat from Iran combined with a lack of cooperation from traditional allies serves as justification for the kingdom to divert from its obedient role as it gradually takes a more assertive position in confronting Iran.

Whether or not negotiations or potential military action successfully put a definite stop to the Iranian nuclear program, the Saudis are likely to begin to consider diverting from their role as a champion for regional non-proliferation to maintain an aura of self-determination and reliance in the next crisis.

While it is doubtful the Saudis will pursue their own nuclear umbrella with the flamboyance of the North Koreans or the aggressiveness of the Iranians, it would be prudent to expect gradual and inconspicuous steps such as expanding their civilian nuclear program to the point where it can potentially serve as a sufficient foundation for a modest military nuclear program and an eventual upgrade of its .

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Over one year ago, Casper Wuite and I became published authors when our book, , was released. An incredible feat for the two of us aside, the revolts that swept the Middle East and North Africa from December 17, 2010, have certainly been the most seismic event of the 21st century so far. Indeed, as we mentioned in the book, the impact of the revolts will continue to be felt for decades.

A Primer

Looking at the uprisings from the other side of the tunnel as 2014 is in full swing, one can see results that have failed to meet the initial optimism that activists and analysts both rightfully envisioned.

Tunisia continues to see political uncertainty with  set to become the new caretaker prime minister. His task will be to form an interim government that will satisfy all parties — a formidable challenge for a country that not too long ago was dubbed the model for Arab nations coming off a political transition.

The National Constituent Assembly in Tunisia has struggled to agree upon a comprehensive draft constitution that is accepted by all actors, while terrorist attacks — once unthinkable in the tiny Maghreb nation — and  have been a reoccurring nightmare. Tunisia, the birthplace of the Arab Uprisings, is in a state of flux. Beyond civil unrest in  in December 2013, lawmakers have  as the assembly struggles to agree upon a constitution that is deemed satisfactory by Islamist and secular parties.   

In Egypt, the so-called "deep state" has made a comeback as the military is back on the scene after a coup d'état against an Islamist president who forcefully imposed his — and his party's — controversial and authoritarian policies upon resilient Egyptians. Egypt's military rulers, under the face of interim President Adly Mansour, have brought back much-hated and oppressive laws, including a controversial curbing of protests as well as a recent state of emergency. Aside from the mass arrests of Muslim Brotherhood members and supporters that have been criticized by , youth activists of the 2011 uprising were recently handed  — the imprisoned blogger Alaa Abdel Fattah was one of them.

The spirit of Tahrir Square, which donned the colors of the Egyptian flag and brought down a long-standing military dictator in Hosni Mubarak, has indeed faded into the abyss. Mohammed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood were certainly not the right leaders for Egypt as they upheld their own dictatorial and inexperienced policies at the expense of everyday Egyptians.

However, neither is the repressive military under General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi — the same military that countless Egyptians stood against on many occasions one year prior. If Tunisia is in a state of flux, Egypt's so-called "revolution" has taken more than two steps back. Should Sisi run for office — as  — all eyes would turn towards revolutionary groups to see if they would accept such an outcome, even if it comes via the ballot box.  

Meanwhile, Libya's government has failed to enforce a solid security strategy, while arms trade and proliferation are a significant concern for Mediterranean countries and sub-Saharan Africa. The vast majority of militias that were involved in the civil war did not disarm and have since sought to challenge the state's security forces. Weapons from Libya have even made their way to West Africa and the Levant. In fact, these same militias managed to destabilize neighboring Mali and drag the country down into its own conflict. Alarmingly, Tripoli's inadequate security policy meant that the country's prime minister, Ali Zeidan, was recently  by extremists.

Tribal militias had even managed to block 80% of Libya's oil exports for months on end, while the country's daily output plummeted severely throughout 2013.

The demise of Libya's security situation has a number of implications not only for the wider region, but also for everyday Libyans as threats of a second civil war are not farfetched.

If the Libyan government fails to curb armed militias — of nearly a few thousand — and secure the abundance of weapons throughout the country, Libya will not progress economically. Libya is in dire need of investment and infrastructure as the country needs to be rebuilt. It is quite clear that foreign companies will think twice about investing in a nation that is severely unstable. The outcome will be a likely increase in unemployment and, as a result, the Libyan people will grow more and more restive. For southern Europe, this will mean an increase in migrants sailing across the Mediterranean.   

Yemen's transition in a post-Saleh era is still marred by corruption, violence and drones. President Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi — who was elected in a farcical one-horse race in February 2012 after a GCC-led transition agreement that forced Ali Abdullah Saleh to step down — is overt regarding US drone strikes in Yemen. In fact, when visiting Washington, D.C. in September 2012, Hadi praised and all but welcomed the attacks by stating: "."

Aside from the moral implications of US drone warfare, Yemen's security situation is clearly of core concern to regional states as well as the international community. Any rise in terrorism-related activity in Yemen has the potential to impact upon Western interests in the Gulf but also abroad, as  in 2009 showed. However, a "zero margin of error" is definitely a false assertion by President Hadi when a  can be mistakenly hit by a drone strike. Hadi is simply a new face for an old, corrupted regime.

Bahrain's al-Khalifa family continues to rule with its oppressive hand. The Gulf kingdom's Shi'a majority has a right to stand up against the state when it fails to cater for all its citizens. Indeed, Manama's human rights record is nothing short of atrocious.

With arbitrary arrest and military-style trials of civilians, Bahrain has managed to present its political unrest as a sectarian issue with Iran at the forefront. While Iran does hold its own agenda over the nation's unrest, a sectarian-led explanation for Bahrain's uprising is far from the truth.

The majority Shi'a population are wrongfully discriminated against and treated as third-class citizens. With all moral issues of human rights abuse aside, Bahrain should empower its Shi'a populace to reduce the much-warranted grievances against the Khalifa family. A united population is imperative for economic growth and social cohesion.  

As civil war in the Levant approaches its third anniversary, it is Syria which is perhaps the most heartbreaking story of what Marc Lynch had dubbed the "" — a term which he himself admitted was not an accurate assessment of the region's uprisings. As battles rage on between forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and armed opposition fighters — consisting of Syrians and non-Syrians, including Islamists, Salafists and the drowned-out voices of secularists — it is the innocent bystanders of the war who have to bear the brunt of both sides' brutality, unending violence, and unyielding stance.

While NATO hit the trigger alarmingly fast in Libya without giving diplomacy a thorough try, the international community has failed to diplomatically bring about peace in Syria. As hopes of a ceasefire in the upcoming Geneva conference fade, the civil war sees no end in sight as innocent men, women and children watch their lives being torn apart on a daily basis.

The Fruits of the "Spring"

Indeed, Syria is the tragedy story of the so-called "Arab Spring," with  having been killed by Assad loyalists and armed opposition fighters. However, while the third anniversary of Mohammed Bouazizi's self-immolation has passed, it is worthwhile to assess the Arab Uprisings in a "then" and "now" fashion.

As each nation's uprising or political unrest differed in terms of its specific causes and outcomes, it is imperative to look upon the countries on an individual basis and evaluate how they have progressed from 2010/11 until now, while also providing suggestions for each nation on a social, political and economic basis.

What will follow as 2014 surges forward is a series of articles which tackle exactly that — on Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria, as well as Morocco, Algeria and Jordan. Such a comprehensive analysis of these nations is necessary as the fruits of the "Spring" have not been met — at least not yet.     

*[This article was produced in partnership with the .]

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"Is the revolution like those trees / whose branches will grow if we water them? / I have lived with this obsession for 10 years / I have come among brothers / My friends, what do you think? These men have been living with oppression / since the day of their birth / They cannot make the trees grow with their water" ().

Music is made for the mind, body and soul. But what about using it to fight for peace, unity and change?

In recent years, the Tuareg have used their soulful beats and rhythmic blues as a platform to express their strife and constant struggle which is prevalent in their homelands. International appearances by Tuareg musicians offer an in-depth insight to existing anthropological issues, notions of identity, and diasporic traditions.

The Tuareg are a loose union of collectives, made up of ancient pastoral nomads, who have inhabited the world’s hottest desert: the Sahara. They refer to themselves as Kel Tamasheq (people who speak Tamasheq) or Kel Tagelmust (people of the veil).

Tuareg cover themselves not only for practical reasons, so as to avoid the inhalation of wind borne sand, but also for more humble reasons. The men are known to find exposing their mouth and nose to strangers, or people of a higher position, as a shameful act. As one visualizes scenes of them gallantly riding their white camels through routes traversing the Mediterranean and Sub-Saharan Africa, with their indigo veils flapping through the Saharan wind, this image of sheer majesty, grandeur and Oriental beauty has become a subject of fascination for academics and adventurists alike.

Prior to the colonial interventions of the 19th century, the Tuareg people were practicing their ancient traditions uninterrupted. However, colonial structures have divided this ancient Tuareg territory, to now span across several countries — inevitably causing significant transformations in the social, political and economic climate, which has somewhat tainted this romanticized image.

The Tuareg are nominally Muslim, and they currently account for of the world’s population. They are primarily grouped into four sovereign federations, crossing Algeria, Niger, Libya and Mali; and to a lesser extent Nigeria and Burkina Faso. Whilst the Tuareg community have been deprived of a homeland, and often constitute the "minority" label in the countries they reside in, their artistic unity and culture has traveled with them, spreading widely across the globe.

Culture and Identity

A prominent part of the Tuareg culture is their musical history. To Tuaregs, music is a well-developed art form: it is their life, their identity, and their voice. Through the harmonic sounds, many stories of achievement and collapse, tales of their century-long resistance against French colonialists and the political regimes that followed, have been shared. Music is a channel in which artists can “” — it has become a means of resistance and a strong artistic expression for the Tuareg community.

With hypnotic vocals and haunting rhythmic blues which draw similarities to Arabic melodies intertwined with Berber instruments, Tuareg women have become infamous for their use of high-pitched cries. This marks their strong presence and it highlights that Tuareg music is the domain of women; where women hold a prominent element of agency.

This artistic expression provides a nuanced understanding of traditions which comprise the hybrid, Tuareg identity. Due to the onslaught by the oppressive governments of Mali and Niger, many band members of prominent Tuareg music groups, including Tinariwen, were brought up in Libyan refugee camps. This resulted in them being under the rule of the Muammar Qadaffi regime, which consequently led to their songs underlying themes of regret for not having a conventional pattern of life, and their personal objection to injustice.

Due to the sheer number of refugee camps traversing Libya, Algeria, Niger and Burkina Faso, it has allowed Tuareg musicians who come from these areas to bring a subjective voice and channel their eclectic experiences into the songs they project to the rest of the world. These songs are aimed at highlighting the importance of sustaining traditions, which have preserved Tuareg identity despite enduring conflict.

The Tuareg of Mali recently gained media interest due to the civil war which erupted in 2012; a war which displaced more than . The conflict was an adverse result of Qadaffi's ouster in Libya. Through this recent war, Tuareg musicians were subject to disdain because of their fight for an independent state, and additional reasons such as their contribution to the musical world; an issue which is in opposition to the beliefs of Islam. This has been widely expressed in the pentatonic rhythms of Amanar — a northeastern, Malian band — in their song, Alghafiat (Peace), where sings:

"My brother, be careful, because one morning we could find ourselves locked in a pen / With racist threats and finger-pointing / The world nowadays is so tiring, with wars all the time."

Tuareg Music Labels

There are numerous, current record labels and music collectives who have documented the journeys of various Tuareg groups, ranging from Amanar, a group that has embraced the modernization of Tuareg sound by utilizing drums and an electric piano, to Etran Finatawa, a Niger-based band who incorporate sounds from nomadic Wodaabe. 

Field recordings, videos and cellphone data collection have allowed Sahel Sounds, a project which emerged in 2009, to record the musical spectacle of the Sahel. Christopher Kirkley, the esteemed founder of Sahel Sounds, has aptly declared the correlation between Tuareg music and the identity of its artists: “The Tuareg guitar is a music that was born in exile. It is music of marginalized groups, distributed via clandestine underground networks, [and] maybe the sound of the diaspora comes across in the music.” These promising music ventures enable a platform for archiving and examining the struggles of Tuareg artists in current global media.

An additional record label that has dedicated its time in revealing the obscure tales and sounds our world harbors, is Sublime Frequencies, a Seattle-based label. In an interview, the co-founder of Sublime Frequencies, Hisham Mayet, highlighted the significant importance that Tuareg music has had in the global sphere:

“Within the last ten years, in the wake of Tinariwen's worldwide success, Tuareg music has become a viable and important message for the rest of the world to hear and appreciate. It has brought to light the struggles that the Tuareg community has faced, for recognition of their rights to live and govern themselves in the vast Sahara desert.”

Music for Change

It is evident that over time, musicians and artists have become advocates for peace and unity in their fight for justice. As a result of his early 1960s protest music, many civil rights workers were rapt by Bob Dylan’s delve into politics and his increasing involvement with the civil rights movement, channeled through his second studio album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. This demonstrates that music can be used to spread the voice of the silenced, while it can act as a symbol of division or unity.

Through various international performances, Tuaregs have gained recognition in the global music world. This has enabled an intriguing memory formation, which has consequently led to a cultural depiction in the form of lyrics. These lyrics have assigned multi-faceted ethnographies of history, personal exile and refugee flight. 

Tinariwen, one of the most recognized Tuareg bands, has gained international acknowledgment due to its numerous global festival appearances and the winning of a Grammy award for the group's fifth album, Tassili.

However, recently, more obscure artists, including Imarhan N'Tinezraf, have emerged from refugee camps traversing the Sahel. Their heart-rending lyrics covering a composite of demands — from calling for the need of education in Tuareg society to demanding an independent state — illustrates how music has enabled bands to express their wistful woes.

If artistic expressions in refugee camps can be used as a tool for survival in the face of the economic, social and political adversities, one can look to use music as a possible solution in diminishing crime and violence — a result of the continuous ennui in current, global refugee camps.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Syria has been making headline news for over two years as the battle rages on between President Bashar al-Assad’s army and the increasingly fragmented bands of rebel fighters.

Meanwhile, Libya, Egypt and other restive nations continue to grumble as the dust of the Arab Spring settles.

We often hear in Western media about the experiences of brave journalists reporting from the front line of these conflict zones. Some of the boldest have also been the most unfortunate, such as the veteran war correspondent Marie Colvin, who was killed by a bomb in Syria last year.

In the West, we naturally focus on issues from our own perspective. However, seeking another viewpoint is always valuable.

A Chinese War Correspondent in Damascus

Chinese news organizations have also been sending their reporters to Syria, where they have struggled to overcome their own set of challenges.

Chinese reporter Yu Zongjin always pretends to be Korean or Japanese when interviewing Syrian rebel forces in Damascus. If he gives away his true nationality, he risks kidnap or worse. Another Chinese journalist, a reporter for Xinhua News, was already kidnapped once in the Syrian capital. Fortunately he escaped alive, but the message was clear: the rebels hate the Chinese.

This hatred stems from the fact that China, together with Russia, has vetoed numerous UN Security Council resolutions, preventing UN-sanctioned foreign intervention in Syria; something many rebel and opposition factions have demanded. The rebels hate the Russians too, thanks to President Vladimir Putin’s support for Assad.

In contrast, BBC and CNN reporters can usually enter rebel-held zones with ease.

Yu arrived in Damascus in August 2012, when the conflict was in full swing. Visa restrictions kept Yu and his colleagues from China state television (CCTV) within the Damascus city limits, mainly conducting interviews with people from the Assad side. To maintain some semblance of balance in their stories, the CCTV team would try to interview rebel forces using Skype.

It was the only safe method, because the rebels could not be trusted. They may have planned to kidnap the team or harm them in some way.

The CCTV team struggled to find good, reliable rebel sources. Sometimes they would report on the rebels by interviewing proxies, such as Turkish or Jordanian "fixers." The team also used information gleaned from other media reports, often those produced by Western journalists.

Constant Risk of Kidnap

In Damascus, the constant risk of kidnap hung over the heads of the Chinese journalists. They had to stay vigilant at all times, not just for potential kidnappers. According to Yu: “Most of the time we were afraid of snipers. Usually they stay hidden, but at the same time they can see you. That makes you extremely vulnerable.”

At that time, Damascus was littered with unexploded bombs. It was impossible to guess when or where the next one might explode. Suicide bombers were prevalent and caused massive destruction that no armor could protect against. Mortars added yet another layer of danger.

Yu said: “One night I was in my room at the Four Seasons Hotel when I heard a mortar go off on the roof nearby. It was too close for comfort and reminded me that the hotel could easily become a rebel target.

“Explosions usually come twice. One side bombs and the other side responds. One day we were out reporting in the street when this happened. Everyone was running away. I ran into a small shop to hide.

“I saw a lady, sitting quietly at her desk surrounded by destruction, just watching the scene. In Arabic, I told her I was sorry. She started to cry.”

Yu explained that the attackers bomb in pairs because people tend to gather at the site of an explosion. A second explosion causes maximum damage, wiping out many of the onlookers.

September 2013 was the tensest month so far for Yu and his team, as the US had just announced its intention to attack Syria. The UN had already left town and the Chinese team were expecting an attack to follow any day soon. They were preparing to leave and had already sent much of their equipment back to Beirut.

Yu said: “The idea of the Americans bombing Damascus scared us mainly because of the rebels.

“If Assad’s forces fell in the capital, the rebels would storm the city and perhaps take over the Four Seasons and the Chinese Embassy. We’d have nowhere left to hide.

“But if we’d left before the bombing started, that would be a different story. I believe that weakening Assad would have helped the situation, by achieving a power balance between his side and the rebel side.

“That could pave the way for talks to begin.”

Assad Has to Step Down

Yu can see only one clear solution to the never-ending Syrian conflict. “Assad has to step down. It may not bring peace but at least it will help end the major battles. The West intervened too late and even now they are not doing enough. They need to reach [an] agreement with Russia and convince Assad to leave. This is essential.” 

When asked for his views on the future of war reporting, Yu said that he is convinced new media will never be able to replace actual war reporters in the field.

He said: “If you just let the people already in the war zone report events by social media, then for sure the story won’t be balanced.

“We still need professional trained reporters out there. To make it safer, they should receive better training, more insurance and more support."

“But there will always be reporters willing to take the risks of war, to see things no-one else will ever see.”

With the complex politics that entwine Syria, it seems the risk could now be greater for some reporters than for others.

*[Note: Yu Zongjin is a reporter for the Beijing-based CCTV news channel. He speaks fluent Arabic and has covered conflicts in Yemen, Libya and, most recently, Syria.]

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post The Snipers of Damascus: Chinese Perspectives on Reporting the Syrian War appeared first on 51�Թ�.

This is the second weekly commentary on key developments across the globe titled “Make Sense of the World: Weekly Report.” We will pick out the most important events, trends and issues for the week and explain them to you with clarity and brevity.

We are still in the experimental stage and figuring out the right format. Please give us feedback to help us serve you better. You can email this directly to atul.singh@fairobserver.com, and we look forward to hearing from you.

This is an extended report and you can click for the summary version.

The big news in Asia Pacific was the third plenum of the 18^th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. has a good summary of the main points of the ���dz����ܲԾ����é issued by China’s leaders after the plenum, the most significant in the post-Deng Xiaopeng era. There is the usual bureaucratic jargon along with some major changes.

First, markets have been called upon to play a “decisive” role in the allocation of resources. This could mean major reforms because earlier markets were only meant to play a “basic” role. Asian markets still fell despite this declaration as there was no mention of financial reforms. Second, a “State Security Committee” will be set up. The Chinese leadership believes the Soviet security system had become weak, corrupt and ineffective. It wants to avoid that mistake and emulate the US by creating its version of the National Security Council. Third, President Xi Jinping has emerged as the most powerful Chinese leader since Deng. Fourth, the one-child policy has been relaxed and a baby bonanza of a million extra births per year is expected. Fifth, education reforms are also on the horizon to develop more-rounded students and foster creativity. Sixth, the dreaded labor camps will be abolished as part of a reform of the justice system. Finally, those who cause environmental damage will be held “criminally responsible” and there will be a tax on the use of almost every natural resource.

While Chinese leaders were meeting at their plenum, China celebrated November 11 by shopping. This day is marketed as “Singles Day” and shoppers spent $5.7 billion buying online. This is thrice what American shoppers spend on Cyber Monday. It demonstrates three things:

1. The one child policy combined with the Chinese preference for sons has led to selective abortion, leading to a massive gender imbalance. Millions of Chinese men are not likely to find love, adding another incentive to splurge on this day.
2. E-commerce is growing exponentially in China.
3. The rise of consumerism among single children born after 1980, the “Little Emperors,” is changing the country beyond recognition. China’s leaders are only bowing to the inevitable by giving markets a “decisive” role, given that its next generation is one of compulsive shoppers.

Elsewhere in Asia Pacific, the Philippine government has botched the relief effort. Floods and landslides in Vietnam have wreaked havoc. The trouble over the amnesty bill has receded in Thailand as the government has retreated. Economic worries are surfacing about Southeast Asia. Many worry that the bubble might be about to burst. Debt-funded consumer and government spending has grown in the region and, in particular, in Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand.

India is in electoral circus mode. Accusations are flying on a daily basis. The Congress-led government has declined to grant autonomy to India’s Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), making independent investigation of any case with political ramifications impossible.

There was hype and hoopla over the retirement of a cricketing god, named Sachin Tendulkar. While he is a fine player, awarding India’s highest honor to him was a classic case of the country’s fixation with actors and cricketers. This national award can be given posthumously and the politicians award it to celebrity figures to gain electoral advantage or to reward political fealty. Many suspect that the ruling party is trying to use Tendulkar as a totem for upcoming elections.

The more important issue that India has to confront is the way it treats Africans. After independence, India emerged as a leader of the developing world. In the 1950s, it led the Non-Aligned Movement and supported independence of African colonies.

That era is over. Today, India is in a row with Nigeria over the murder of a Nigerian in Goa. Large parts of the state have been run-over by foreigners. Mandrem and Morjim are Russian localities and Arambol is home to Israelis. Drug use is common and many foreigners are involved in drug trade. The murder was a result of the gang war between two drug gangs, which led to Nigerian protests. While some Nigerians are involved in drug trade, at the heart of the row is Indian racism towards Africans. Goa is ruled by the BJP, a party challenging the ruling Congress Party in New Delhi. One of its ministers declared that Nigerians are “like cancer” — an irresponsible comment at best and a xenophobic one at worst.

In neighboring Pakistan, the Nawaz Sharif government is going to put former President Pervez Musharraf on trial for treason. Musharraf was a military general who deposed Sharif in a coup, and he will become the first military leader to be tried for treason in Pakistan’s 66-year history.

Pakistan is beset by turmoil of all kinds. On the day of Ashura, Shi’a-Sunni violence erupted in Rawalpindi, which remains under curfew since. Earlier in the week, Dr. Nasiruddin Haqqani, son of Jalaluddin Haqqani, the founder of Haqqani Network, was gunned down in Islamabad. He was responsible for fundraising, logistics and political affairs of the Haqqani Network; his death is arguably more important than Hakimullah Mesud’s, who was killed just days ago in a US drone strike.

Afghanistan and the US have agreed upon a draft of the Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA) that has been sent to Loya Jirga, the Afghan assembly of tribal leaders for their consent. The BSA will extend US military presence in Afghanistan for an indefinite period. It also gives the US exclusive legal jurisdiction over its military and civil personnel.

As tribal leaders gathered to vote on the BSA, a powerful suicide attack a few hundred yards away killed at least ten people. This was followed by the beheading of six security contractors in southern Afghanistan.

While violence continues, Afghan opium production has reached a record high. The area under poppy cultivation has risen to 209,000 hectares, up from 154,000 in 2012 and the 2007 peak figure of 193,000.

Saudi Arabia, with its massive oil wealth, has decided to clamp down on foreign workers. It has an estimated 9 million workers serving a population of 19 million. Foreign workers are often from poorer countries such as Egypt, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Pakistan.

An unfair visa sponsorship system means that their sponsors often demand an annual fee for bringing them into the country. Workers are underpaid, subjected to abuse and treated with a racism that is among the most extreme in the world. In effect, an affluent Saudi society is being served by what The Economist calls “a pliant underclass with few rights.” The kingdom aims for a Saudization of the labor market to decrease its 13 percent unemployment rate. However, it remains to be seen whether cosseted Saudis will take up the jobs that have so far been done by poor immigrants.

It turns out that Saudi Arabia is not alone in mistreating immigrant workers. Amnesty International has for treating workers like animals and even referring to them as such. Dangerous working conditions, non-payment of wages and squalid living conditions are par for the course. Often, workers are threatened with penalty fines, deportation or loss of income if they do not show up to work, even when they are not being paid. Racism is rife, employers disregard basic human rights, and workers live in fear.

Civil war continues in Syria. A bomb attack on a government building near Damascus has killed 31 people, while two explosions occurred near the Iranian Embassy in neighboring Lebanon. Violence has been increasing in the Syrian capital with clashes between government forces and rebels intensifying in the suburbs.

In North Africa, Libya’s deputy intelligence chief has been kidnapped as the central government struggles to control powerful local militia. Clashes have occurred in Tripoli and the Misrata militia is to leave the city.

In Iraq, just as in Pakistan, Shi’a pilgrims have been targeted. Bomb blasts in Baquba killed at least 20 people and left many more wounded. According to the UN, “.” Sectarian violence has reached its highest level since 2008.

Meanwhile, Egypt is conducting talks with Russia. The parties are discussing an arms deal worth $2 billion. If it were to go through, US influence on Egypt would diminish. The US cut defense aid when the Egyptian military ousted former President Mohammed Morsi. Now, Egyptian generals are striking back.

In neighboring Gaza, Hamas is feeling the pressure from the generals who have destroyed 90 percent of the tunnels between Gaza and Egypt. Gaza has no power, sewage is flowing untreated, and inflation is rampant. Hamas is under immense pressure and is cracking down on dissent.

As the situation turns desperate, Hamas has appointed its first spokeswoman. Isra al-Modallal is a divorced young woman of 23 and it is heartening to see the Islamist group — with a patchy record on women’s rights — move in the right direction. In Turkey, women can now wear trousers in parliament, relaxing a regulation that only allowed them to wear suits.

Finally, Boeing has emerged as a big winner of the Dubai Airshow, netting $100 billion of orders from the four big carriers of the Gulf: Etihad, Qatar Airways, Emirates and flydubai.

The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) rejected a proposal to suspend the trials of Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta and his deputy, William Ruto, for a year at the International Criminal Court (ICC). The proposal was put forth by Rwanda and supported by other African states.

Kenyatta and Ruto are accused of crimes against humanity for the role they played in the ethnic bloodshed that swept across Kenya in the aftermath of the 2007 elections. More than 1,100 people were killed, 3,500 injured, and up to 600,000 forcibly displaced as a result of the violence.

Seven of the 15 UNSC members, including Russia and China, voted for the draft resolution while the others abstained. A UNSC resolution needs nine votes to succeed, assuming none of the five permanent members veto it.

Kenyatta now becomes the first serving head of state to be tried by the ICC. At heart is a deeper issue about global governance. African leaders believe they are being unfairly targeted by the ICC, which is based in The Hague and which they believe to be racist as well as neo-colonial. All of the are against Africans, who point out that former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has not attracted any attention for his role in the Iraq War.

The issue is the fact that African leaders believe they are not being treated like everybody else. Global powers such as the United States, China and Russia have not signed up for the ICC. Regional powers such as Israel, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, India and North Korea have not done so either. Others believe that given poor governance structures, lack of rule of law and an independent judiciary in much of Africa, the ICC is the last resort for Africans for justice and the best way to change the culture of impunity that has long existed in the continent.

A French hostage held for nearly a year escaped in Nigeria but Boko Haram, the Nigerian Islamist group, claimed that it had kidnapped another Frenchman: a priest working in northern Cameroon. The kidnapping occurred soon after the US designated Boko Haram and its splinter group, Ansaru, as “foreign terrorist organizations” on the grounds that they have established links with al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and in Somalia.

To combat al-Shabab, the UNSC authorized an increase of 4,000 peacekeepers in Somalia. This increase has come on the heels of a US military raid to capture one of the group’s leaders. While the focus has been on the Philippines, the northern self-governing Puntland region of Somalia has suffered from a cyclone that has killed over 100 people, swept away livestock and destroyed homes.

As per the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), 460,000 people have been displaced in Sudan’s Darfur region in 2013. This figure is higher than the combined figure for 2011 and 2012. OCHA states that this is “a result of inter-tribal fighting and clashes between the Sudanese Armed Forces and armed movements.”

OCHA has also been describing the situation in the Central African Republic as “a tinderbox,” because Muslims and Christians are pitted against each other in a brutal civil war that has led to a complete breakdown of law and order.

In neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo, peace talks between the government and the rebel M23 group have collapsed in Kampala. The rebel group had recently declared a ceasefire after military defeat.

Gambia broke its ties with Taiwan for “strategic national interest.” China will invest in Gambia and build infrastructure. China’s footprint in Africa continues to grow and now only Swaziland, Sao Tome, Principe and Burkina Faso retain ties with Taiwan.

Ethiopian workers returned from Saudi Arabia with tales of mistreatment involving beatings, robbery and incarceration.

Nigeria is involved in a diplomatic row with India after a Nigerian was murdered in Goa. This is covered in greater detail in the section on Asia.

Amnesty International has of misrepresenting the extent and the causes of pollution in the Niger delta. The company is apparently also failing to curb the devastation caused by oil spills.

Another company has announced that it will sever ties with suppliers who do not respect the land rights of local communities. This company is Coca-Cola and its operations in its two African hubs, Nigeria and South Africa, will be affected.

As more of the world falls in love with chocolate, cocoa processing is consolidating in the hands of two giants who will control over 60 percent of the world supply. Cargill is in the process of buying out Archer Daniels Midland’s cocoa business and Barry Callebaut scooped up the cocoa unit of Petra Foods.

Meanwhile, Forbes reported that the number of African billionaires surged to 27. In 2012, it was 16, reaching a remarkable increase of over two-thirds.

Ericsson declared that it expected mobile subscription in sub-Saharan Africa to reach 930 million by 2019. It estimates smartphones to reach 476 million and mobile data traffic to grow 17 times by that year.

The eurozone grew by an anemic 0.1 percent between July and September. Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain — collectively referred to as PIGS — continue to remain mired in high unemployment, low productivity and poor public finances. Even Germany’s economy grew by a mere 0.3 percent and it is under scrutiny from Brussels for running persistent current account surpluses.

Many argue that Germany’s protection of its domestic services industry enables it to run massive surpluses, thereby skewing the eurozone economy. The truth is that an aging Europe with excessive regulation and little entrepreneurial energy is fast-losing its competitive edge in the new global economy.

Unemployment in parts of Europe has crossed the 50 percent mark. In France, unemployment has been over 10 percent since 1980 when Mitterand became president. The country has now suffered a credit ratings downgrade by Standard & Poor’s because of the disastrous performance of the Hollande government. Brussels has warned Spain and Italy over their debt and deficit levels. French and Dutch plans have barely passed muster. Eastern Europe is not doing much better and the Russian economy, despite its energy bonanza, is in a sorry state.

The economy is not the only thing in question in Europe. NATO launched a massive exercise in northern Poland, its biggest live wire exercise since 2006. At a time when its defense spending is falling fast, this exercise was supposed to be a signal to anyone intending to attack a NATO ally. Russia might have an increasing budget, but it has no intention of attacking a NATO ally; the exercise seems to have been carried out to reassure members looking for relevance in a post-Afghanistan era.

The far right in Europe is becoming more sophisticated. Dutch leader Geert Wilders and French leader Marine Le Pen held a conference in The Hague to announce cooperation in the next elections for the European Parliament to “fight the monster called Europe.” With Pew Research reporting just 41 percent of the French in favor of the EU, the ghosts of the wafer-thin approval of 1992 Maastricht Treaty and the 2005 rejection of the draft European constitution might be about to rise with renewed vigor in France.

In Germany, politicians seem close to a deal that would extend the right of dual citizenship to naturalized Germans and the children of immigrants. Former German President Christian Wulff has become the first German head of state to go on trial for a sum of €753.90 that equal $1,013. The sum is negligible but demonstrates that the principle of public propriety in Germany matters a great deal more than in other countries.

In the talks with Iran, France is taking the strongest line against Tehran. This is surprising because France is never going to play a major role in military action against Iran. French President Francois Hollande is in crisis at home and it seems he is compensating with an overly assertive foreign policy.

Already, the French have intervened in Mali and are stuck there with no end date in sight. On a visit to Israel, Hollande talked tough on Iran while completely omitting to mention Israeli settlements in the West Bank. US Secretary of State John Kerry has been much more even handed in comparison. A left-wing French government is incongruously more bellicose than the US or the UK on Iran and losing the goodwill that Jacques Chirac garnered for France by opposing the Iraq War.

Chile’s elections will go into the second round after Michelle Bachelet failed to achieve an outright majority. She received 47 percent of the vote; Evelyn Matthei, her main rival, got 25 percent. Bachelet is still expected to win.

Colombia has elections next year but is already gearing up for them. President Juan Manuel Santos will be competing with Oscar Ivan Zuluaga, who has the backing of former President Alvaro Uribe.

Talks with FARC guerillas suffered a minor hiccup because of the discovery of a purported FARC plot to murder Uribe. Negotiations with the guerillas continue as President Santos presses for a change in drug policy that includes alternatives to prohibition.

The murder rate in Latin America and the Caribbean rose by 11 percent in the first decade of the 21^st century. The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) estimates that 1 million people died as a result of criminal violence in the region. Poverty, unemployment, low wages, lack of schooling and family breakdown were said to be some of the contributing causes.

The rate of deforestation in the Amazon rose by 28 percent in Brazil over a year. In the last few years, while deforestation was proceeding apace, the rate of this phenomenon was declining. Environmentalists blame last year’s controversial reform of the forest protection law as the main reason for the rising rate. The change has reduced protected areas on farms and declared an amnesty for areas destroyed before 2008. A Brazilian banker involved in a major corruption scandal fled to Italy. Henrique Pizzoloto has an Italian passport and was avoiding jail terms. Brazil’s Supreme Court has sent 25 businessmen, bankers and politicians, including the chief of staff of ex-President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, to prison.

Brazil is also going through the painful process of coming to terms with its past. The remains of Joao Goulart, a former president, were exhumed so that the cause of his death could be ascertained. He was deposed by a military coup and died in Argentina in 1976 of a heart attack. It has long been suspected that he was murdered on the behest of Brazil’s military rulers.

Obamacare, President Barack Obama’s healthcare reforms, has been the focus of attention again. The Affordable Care Act (ACA), the legislation that enacted Obamacare, compels insurers to offer a more comprehensive coverage, making many policies void under the new law. This leaves many Americans facing cancelled policies and increased premiums. The numbers who signed up for Obamacare were far fewer than estimated and many Republican governors have refused to implement ACA. Bill Clinton, the former Democrat president, turned on Obama and asked him to fulfill his promise to let Americans keep the healthcare they liked. As the new website for healthcare exchanges malfunctioned, Obama eventually bowed to pressure and deferred the implementation of ACA by a year.

The fumbles over the launch of healthcare reform has infused new life into the political battle for the control of the country. Not too long ago, the US government shutdown had led to a loss of momentum for the Republicans. Democrats were hopeful about the midterms; now they are nervous. In fact, 39 Democrats in the House of Representatives voted for a Republican bill that would allow insurance companies to sell policies that did not comply with the minimum standards of the ACA, blowing a hole through Obamacare. Needless to say, the Senate would not pass this and Obama has promised to veto it.

The partisanship in US politics will ratchet up because the Republicans no longer feel chastised and have smelt blood again. Democrats will have to shore up support from their core loyalists for the next midterm. Until then, everyone will be campaigning, covertly if not overtly. Until the midterms are over, expect more bickering and gridlock in Washington, and little reform on immigration, taxation or anything else.

While political wrangling goes on, the White House declared that, for the first time in two decades, the US is importing less foreign oil than it is producing domestically. It crowed about better gas mileage, more biofuels, less pollution and greater energy independence.

There is some truth to these claims. Gas mileage or, as the rest of the world would say, fuel efficiency has certainly improved as a result of legislation. Greater production of oil and gas in the US has pushed down energy costs for American companies, giving them a competitive advantage ������-à-������ Europe, which has to pay through its nose for Russian gas, and Japan, which will no longer be able to meet its green house gas reductions because of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Yet, the environmental costs of increased domestic production are yet to be quantified properly and the US is a long way from energy independence.

Snapchat, a hot Silicon Valley startup that began in Stanford, rejected a $3 billion offer from Facebook. Snapchat is a photo messaging platform. It allows people to send messages that disappear once they are viewed. Unlike Facebook or Twitter, people do not leave behind a permanent record. The platform is particularly popular with teenagers. It is said to be used for sexting, the practice of sending sexually explicit pictures that are often used for what teenagers call “hookups.”

Such a large amount of money in social media might indicate another Silicon Valley bubble. Snapchat and Twitter are clever tools for communication, but they are not based on hard science or cutting edge technology. For all the talk of being the technology center of the universe, travelling in Silicon Valley is increasingly a third world experience. Interminable traffic jams, pathetic public transport, and poor roads reveal that all is not right in this mythic land.

Three other developments are most interesting this week.

Sony sold over 1 million Playstation 4s in the first 24 hours. It is an indication of the new era we are living in where young people increasingly spend more time behind their screens than playing with each other.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is building a long-range anti-ship missile to counter China. Back in the day, DARPA came up with the Internet and had a string of successes to its name. China’s development of an anti-ship carrier missile has spooked US policymakers but it is also possible that the defense establishment might be playing up the Chinese threat to avoid sequester cuts of about $500 billion over a decade.

Finally, Google won its copyright battle against publishers and authors. Its scanning project will put more than 30 million works in a digital library. The court accepted Google’s argument that its project is “fair use” and provides “significant public benefits.”

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

Image: Copyright © . All Rights Reserved

The post Make Sense of the World: Weekly Report appeared first on 51�Թ�.

This is the second weekly commentary on key developments across the globe titled “Make Sense of the World: Weekly Roundup.” After much feedback, we are playing around with the format and please continue to send your feedback to atul.singh@fairobserver.com, with “Weekly Roundup” as the subject.

As we explained last week, this roundup examines the deeper story behind the most important events, trends and issues for the week. This is a summary version and you can click for the full report.

The big news in Asia Pacific was the third plenum of the 18^th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. It signaled some major changes.

First, markets have been called upon to play a “decisive” role in the allocation of resources. Second, a “State Security Committee” will be set up. It will emulate the US National Security Council. Third, President Xi Jinping has emerged as the most powerful Chinese leader since Deng Xiaopeng. Fourth, the one-child policy has been relaxed and a baby bonanza of a million extra births per year is expected. Fifth, education reforms are also on the horizon to foster creativity and develop more rounded students. Sixth, the dreaded labor camps will be abolished as part of a reform of the justice system. Finally, those who cause environmental damage will be held “criminally responsible” and there will be a tax on the use of almost every natural resource.

On November 11, celebrated in China as “Singles Day,” shoppers spent $5.7 billion buying online. This is thrice what American shoppers spend on Cyber Monday.

Elsewhere in Asia Pacific, the Philippine government has botched the relief effort after last week’s typhoon.

Meanwhile, India is in electoral circus mode. Accusations are flying on a daily basis. The Congress-led government has declined to grant autonomy to India’s Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), making any independent investigation impossible.

India is in a row with Nigeria over the murder of a Nigerian in Goa, and is in the spotlight for its racist treatment of Africans.

In neighboring Pakistan, the Nawaz Sharif government is going to put former President Pervez Musharraf on trial for treason. Shi'a-Sunni violence has erupted in Rawalpindi, which remains under curfew. Dr. Nasiruddin Haqqani, son of Jalaluddin Haqqani, the founder of the Haqqani Network, was gunned down in Islamabad.

In Afghanistan, violence continues and opium production has reached a record high.

Saudi Arabia, with its massive oil wealth, has decided to clamp down on foreign workers. The kingdom aims for a Saudization of its labor market to decrease its 13 percent unemployment rate. However, it remains to be seen whether cosseted Saudis will take up the jobs so far done by poor immigrants.

It turns out that Saudi Arabia is not alone in mistreating immigrant workers. Amnesty International has Qatar for treating workers like animals and even referring to them as such.

Civil war continues in Syria. A bomb attack on a government building near Damascus has killed 31 people, while two explosions occurred near the Iranian Embassy in neighboring Lebanon.

Libya’s deputy intelligence chief has been kidnapped as the central government struggles to control powerful local militia.

In Iraq, just as in Pakistan, Shi'a pilgrims have been targeted. Bomb blasts in Baquba killed at least 20 people and left many more wounded. According to the UN, “.” Sectarian violence has reached its highest level since 2008.

Meanwhile, Egypt is conducting talks with Russia. The parties are discussing an arms deal worth $2 billion. If it were to go through, US influence on Egypt would diminish.

Hamas has appointed its first spokeswoman, while in Turkey, women can now wear trousers in parliament relaxing a regulation that only allowed them to wear suits.

Boeing has emerged as a big winner of the Dubai Airshow, netting $100 billion of orders from the four big carriers from the Gulf: Etihad, Qatar Airways, Emirates and flydubai.

The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) rejected a proposal to suspend the trials of Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta and his deputy, William Ruto, for a year at the International Criminal Court (ICC). The proposal was put forth by Rwanda and supported by other African states.

Kenyatta and Ruto are accused of crimes against humanity for the role they played in the ethnic bloodshed that swept across Kenya in the aftermath of the 2007 elections. More than 1,100 people were killed, 3,500 injured, and up to 600,000 forcibly displaced as a result of the violence.

A French hostage held for nearly a year escaped in Nigeria but Boko Haram, the Nigerian Islamist group, claimed that it had kidnapped a French priest in northern Cameroon. The kidnapping occurred soon after the US designated Boko Haram and its splinter group, Ansaru, as “foreign terrorist organizations.”

As per the UN, 460,000 people have been displaced in Sudan’s Darfur region in 2013. This figure is higher than the combined figure for 2011 and 2012.

Gambia broke its ties with Taiwan for “strategic national interest.”

Forbes reported that the number of African billionaires surged to 27. In 2012, it was 16, marking a remarkable increase of over two thirds.

Ericsson declared that it expected mobile subscription in sub-Saharan Africa to reach 930 million by 2019. It estimates smartphones to reach 476 million and mobile data traffic to grow 17 times by that year.

The eurozone grew by an anemic 0.1 percent between July and September. Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain —collectively referred to as PIGS — continue to remain mired in high unemployment, low productivity and poor public finances. Even Germany’s economy grew by a mere 0.3 percent and it is under scrutiny from Brussels for running persistent current account surpluses.

Unemployment in parts of Europe has crossed the 50 percent mark. France has suffered a credit ratings downgrade by Standard & Poor’s because of the disastrous performance of the Hollande government. Brussels has warned Spain and Italy over their debt and deficit levels. French and Dutch plans have barely passed muster. Eastern Europe is not doing much better and the Russian economy, despite its energy bonanza, is in sorry state.

The far right in Europe is becoming more sophisticated. Dutch leader Geert Wilders and French leader Marine Le Pen held a conference in The Hague to announce cooperation in the next elections for the European Parliament to “fight the monster called Europe.”

Chile’s elections will go into the second round after Michelle Bachelet failed to achieve an outright majority. She received 47 percent of the vote and Evelyn Matthei got 25 percent. Bachelet is still expected to win.

Colombia has elections next year but is already gearing up for them. President Juan Manuel Santos will be competing with Oscar Ivan Zuluaga, who has the backing of former President Alvaro Uribe.

Talks with FARC guerillas suffered a minor hiccup because of the discovery of a purported FARC plot to murder Uribe. Negotiations with the guerillas continue as President Santos presses for a change in drug policy that includes alternatives to prohibition.

The murder rate in Latin America and the Caribbean rose by 11 percent in the first decade of the 21^st century.

The rate of deforestation in the Amazon rose by 28 percent in Brazil over a year. In the last few years, while deforestation was proceeding apace, the rate of this phenomenon was declining.

Meanwhile, a Brazilian banker involved in a major corruption scandal fled to Italy. Henrique Pizzoloto has an Italian passport and was avoiding jail terms like 25 businessmen, bankers and politicians, including the chief of staff of ex-President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

The remains of Joao Goulart, a former Brazilian president, were exhumed so that the cause of his death could be ascertained. It is suspected that he was murdered by the military rulers who conducted a coup against him in 1976.

Obamacare, President Barack Obama’s healthcare reforms, has been the focus of attention again. Bill Clinton, the former Democrat president, turned on Obama and asked him to fulfill his promise to let Americans keep the healthcare they liked. As the new website for healthcare exchanges malfunctioned, Democrats facing reelection grew uneasy and turned on their president. Obama eventually bowed to pressure and deferred the implementation of his reforms by a year.

The White House declared that, for the first time in two decades, the US is importing less foreign oil than it is producing domestically.

Snapchat, a hot Silicon Valley startup that began in Stanford, rejected a $3 billion offer from Facebook. Snapchat is a photo messaging platform that allows people to send messages that disappear once they are viewed.

Sony sold over 1 million Playstation 4s in the first 24 hours.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is building a long-range anti-ship missile to counter China.

Finally, Google won its longstanding copyright battle against publishers and authors. Its scanning project will put more than 30 million works in a digital library. The court accepted Google’s argument that its project is “fair use” and provides “significant public benefits.”

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Under the influence of current Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, who previously served as an AKP advisor for many years, Turkey began to pursue aimed at fostering “economic interdependence” between itself and its neighbors, thereby incentivizing all parties to maintain cordial relations.

In 1991, only ten percent of Turkey’s foreign trade was with regional partners, while 50 percent was with European nations. By 2011, regional trade to 22 percent, while trade with Europe declined to 41 percent. Moreover, Turkish direct investment in neighboring countries soared from $900 million in 2001 to more than $6 billion in 2011.

Turkey this new strategy vigorously with respect to Syria: Over the next decade, Turkey would go on to sign 51 protocols for increased economic cooperation, lift visa requirements for civilian travel between the two countries, and push for the establishment of a Levantine free trade zone to open new markets for Turkish goods.  

, “commercial and political relations were booming, the number of nationals traveling in both directions had reached unprecedented levels, and leaders of both countries spent vacation time together.” : “The main rationale behind these initiatives is to ensure realignment of the region toward economic cooperation and away from the politics of confrontation.”

“Re-securitization” or Preserving Turkish Business Interests?

Thus, Turkey’s rapprochement with Syria is in large part attributable to a reformulation of its foreign policy, with a focus on the development of economic integration with its neighbors.

This then begs the question: What motivated Turkey’s decision to support the Syrian opposition over its longtime ally, Bashar al-Assad, given its demonstrable success in pursuing greater economic and political cooperation? Does such a decision represent a “re-securitization” of the country’s relationship with Syria?

Examining Turkey’s relationships with other countries affected by the Arab Spring provides some clues. On February 2, 2011, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan for Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to resign following weeks of mass protest against the regime.

Mubarak had been a cooperative agent for several years in Turkey’s regional integration strategy. Egypt inked a with Turkey in 2005, which saw trade volume rise from less than $1 billion that year to more than $3 billion in 2010, with Turkish investments in Egypt rising to $1.5 billion from a negligible $60 million in the same period. 

Nevertheless, Erdogan urged Mubarak to “.”

If the Erdogan government’s concern for the will of the people seemed hollow then, its brutal repression of Turkey’s own popular protest movement this summer fully revealed its true character.

Certain observers to a much more likely motive for Turkey’s position on Mubarak: unrest in Egypt might have rippled further into the region, potentially disrupting the oil flows and foreign investments on which the Turkish economy depended. Given Turkey’s growing but still relatively minor financial interests in Egypt, it likely reasoned that it had little to lose in antagonizing Mubarak even if he stayed, but the threat of protracted unrest was a much greater risk that it should attempt to forestall.

Another key example is Turkey’s relationship with Muammar Qaddafi which was, however, more complicated. Turkish financial interests in Libya were considerably greater than those in Egypt. to the Doha Institute, Libya had invested tens of billions of dollars into Turkish construction enterprises operating in the country, with billions more promised in the coming years. Indeed, , Libya was Turkey’s second largest market for construction projects abroad after Russia.

More than 160 Turkish investment projects in Libya were underway on the eve of the uprising, and nearly 25,000 Turkish workers were in the country manning the projects. Given the scale of Turkey’s financial interests in Libya, it vacillated for months between criticizing the late Libyan leader and insulating him from international condemnation —  for his ouster only once the NATO bombardment began and when it became clear that Qaddafi's time was limited.

Ultimately, the Arab Spring in Libya was disastrous for Turkish business interests. Thousands of Turkish workers were forced to flee the violence, which numerous construction projects and disrupted payments of more than $15 billion to Turkish investors, which as of February 2013 were still unpaid.

Given Turkey’s close economic and political cooperation with Syria, it held out even longer than in Libya in avoiding a clear call for Assad to step down, with Davutoglu  the Syrian president as late as August 2011. But in light of Turkey’s substantial losses in Libya due to violent conflict and the decreasing likelihood that it would be able to maintain a profitable relationship with the Syrian regime in the future, Erdogan for Assad’s resignation in November 2011.

Of course, Turkey could not have anticipated the resilience of the Syrian regime and the extent to which that decision would come with its own set of economic setbacks. Syria its free-trade agreement with Turkey in December 2011 as a result of Turkey’s support for the rebels. And as violence in the country grew when Assad refused to step down and began to clamp down militarily on the rebellion, trade dropped precipitously before in mid-2012.

A Threat to Economic Cooperation?

The persistence of the Assad regime now presents multiple threats to Turkey’s goal of greater economic alignment with the Middle East, foremost because the Assad government is no longer willing to function as a partner to Turkey as it had over the past decade.   

Moreover, continued economic engagement with the regime has become undesirable following the violence in Syria, which has poisoned the government’s reputation and those of its supporters. Finally, the Syrian conflict has not only crippled the country’s trade with Turkey, but has interfered with Turkish trade in the Gulf, as violence the transport of Turkish goods through Syria.

Overall, the Syrian government has emerged not only as a threat to Turkish-Syrian economic cooperation, but to continued Turkish economic integration in the Middle East — a lynchpin the neoliberal program the AKP government has vigorously pursued for more than a decade.

Turkey’s reconfigured relations with Syria are not a product of a regressive security policy vis-à-vis Syria itself, but a function of much broader political and economic program encompassing the entire region. As such, it is not appropriate as yet to refer to a “re-securitization” of the Turkish-Syrian dynamic, as Turkey’s support for the Syrian opposition is grounded in a fundamentally different set of incentives and fears than those that predominated in the 1990s.

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I have the initial report of the Economic, Social, and Environmental Council (CESE) in Morocco, which has been charged to assess the necessary conditions to implement regionalization in the southern provinces and eventually the entire country.

I have detailed its major findings and procedures, discussed the roles of various stakeholders, and probed for likely priorities in preparing Morocco for regionalization. With the anticipated final report due before the end of the year, it is a good time to reflect on what is involved in regionalization, once it is defined in law.

Regionalization and decentralization are terms used to describe the same phenomena – how to share power between the central government and the rest of the country. This is an important consideration at this time because it is also a major issue in determining the structure of the government in Libya, the set up of the provincial authorities in Tunisia, and the separation of powers in Egypt, to name a few countries where decentralization is being seriously considered.

There are at least four intersecting lines of authority involved in the devolution of power from the central government to locally elected officials:

1. The division of political/administrative decision-making among the central government, the regional authorities (currently 16 regions and 61/62 provinces), and local governments;
2. Prioritizing and managing the country’s economic investments, including infrastructure, economic development projects, tourism, agriculture, economic growth, entrepreneurship, and higher education;
3. Coordinating the provision of citizen services, including health, education (at all levels, including technical and vocational training), retirement, disability, and environmental services and monitoring;
4. Supporting all of these lines are mechanisms dealing with taxation, human and natural resources, accounting and reporting, and coordinated monitoring and evaluation of government performance.

Managing the Transition to Regionalization

This brief list gives a flavor of the complexity of moving ahead with regionalization. It is important to recognize that given this complexity, it may take up to a decade before full regionalization in any one area of Morocco is completely implemented.

Fortunately, there is a wealth of international experience that can help Morocco and other countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) meet the challenges of devolving authority and building the institutional and human capacity needed. For example, a major models has recently been released on Libya.

Another good place to start to gather experience on the road ahead was at the and the 4^th  (UCLG), recently hosted in Rabat. With delegates from more than 100 countries, “the Summit […] envisaged to be a unique opportunity to present and discuss concrete local solutions to world challenges. It [was an] occasion to define policy, shape action and set future strategic goals for the new international development agenda.”

Local governments throughout the world, and in places such as Morocco where the urban population now exceeds 70 percent of the population, are increasingly tasked with spearheading new delivery systems for social services, reducing congestion and pollution, balancing budgets through creating new and more efficient revenue sources, and integrating their initiatives and responsibilities within a larger, national fabric.

King Mohammed VI made Morocco’s commitment to this vision clear. Addressing the UCLG Congress leaders, he acknowledged the “tremendous responsibility incumbent upon local and regional actors” for “building good governance within their territorial boundaries.”

He declared: “It is no longer acceptable today that central governments should have exclusive authority in defining development strategies for local communities.” Ensuring “local authorities have the necessary legal, financial and human resources” to “fulfill their mission,” the king said, “needs to be placed at the heart of local public policy.”

The Rabat meetings will enable local and regional leaders, multilateral partners, analysts and researchers, and specialists in the complexities of urban society to review and make recommendations regarding the next set of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) within the framework of , set to begin in 2016. It is a prime opportunity for Moroccans to discuss the opportunities and challenges of moving forward with decentralization, while ensuring quality of life for its citizens.

It is critical that the Maghreb countries learn from the experiences of others and from one another, to rapidly develop roadmaps to power-sharing between the central authorities and locally-elected officials.

*[This article was produced in collaboration with .]

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After more than two years, economic issues raised during the Arab Uprisings are still lingering on government agendas. Along with governance and transparency concerns, the most obdurate legacy for most countries is the demand for meaningful employment — a nettlesome priority that bedevils governments in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), including the wealthy Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members.

A Complex and Interconnected Challenge

Current governments are burdened with trying to fix education and training regimes that did not prepare local management and workforces for competitive global markets. The lack of a qualified labor force is part of a web of symptoms that result in weak economic growth policies. In addition, opaque regulations are an obstacle to open and competitive markets, as well as restrictive financial regimes that continue to block attempts to broadly facilitate entrepreneurship and greater domestic and foreign investment. While there are some glimmers of improvement, after decades of neglect, the prospects for short-term solutions are limited.

Improving education and training requires an organic strategy that incorporates stakeholders across the employment spectrum, from labor and management to the labor pool, government ministries, the private sector, and all intermediary groups and institutions, including NGOs and civil society focused on concerns ranging from gender to healthy environments.

A core economic issue is the plight of youth, usually defined as those under 30, with little schooling through university education, who are marginally employed usually in the informal economy, unemployed, or seeking employment. The priority of youth employment was in the spotlight of the in Amman, Jordan where experts in employment and education and advocates such as of Jordan were quite explicit about the challenges confronting the region. According to the , some 40 percent of men and 62 percent of women in the MENA are engaged in non-wage employment (farming and self-employment).

The (ILO) put youth unemployment at 28.3 percent in 2012 and says it will not reverse course for the next five years, despite a global economic recovery the ILO projects at 30 percent by 2018. In his remarks at the WEF, Majid Jaafar, CEO of Crescent Petroleum, noted that on  percent of the region's youth are currently unemployed and the figure is rising — expected to exceed 30 percent within five years, and already exceeding 50 percent in some countries.

Challenges to Accelerating Youth Employment

While there is universal agreement on the centrality of improving job opportunities for youth in the MENA, realistic programs and goal-setting are constrained by four fundamental factors:

1.   Availability of jobs: Throughout the region, from Mauritania and Morocco to Qatar and , there is a jobs deficit due either to a lack of opportunities, a mismatch between the job skills and those of the labor pool, gender restrictions, or perceptions of young people concerning available jobs.

2.   Lack of investment in projects that create jobs for nationals: Either there is not enough local and foreign investment to drive job creation, or projects are capital (energy) or (construction, infrastructure), limiting opportunities for inexperienced local hires.

3.   Inefficient ecosystem supporting new business development: Onerous local labor regulations, lack of reasonable access to financing for start-ups and business expansion that inhibits entrepreneurship, perceived threats to existing unions and industries, and insufficient resources for targeted training and education combine to stifle growth.

4.   Need to coordinate and target international and national economic and technical assistance programs: Too often, well-meaning efforts are in silos within government ministries or agencies, and do not benefit from a broader perspective on closing the gap between education and employment and applying value chain analysis and similar tools to better utilize human investment dollars.

Agencies look to addressing their specific objectives rather than seeing how their efforts impact other agencies. For example, entrepreneurship, technical, and vocational training will benefit from closer coordination and sharing of resources to align programs to provide skills for trainees that enable them to make choices, rather than limit their options to certain trades.

Given the wealth and demographic differences among the MENA countries, there are few cookie-cutter approaches or “lessons learned” that can be applied across the region. Rather, a series of principles need to be defined in each case, informed by similar efforts in other parts of the world. points out:

“North African economies face significant challenges related to labour-market efficiency and institutions. More labour-market flexibility and more efficient allocation of talent, as well as a fundamental overhaul of the institutional framework, will be crucial for creating growth and employment in these countries [Libya, Morocco, Egypt, and Algeria].”

While the required reforms may be conceptually and technically straightforward, the political, social, and economic stakeholders in each country will inevitably shape the policy outcomes.

Take the issue of facilitating skills acquisition by youth. With the majority of the populations in MENA between the ages of 15-35, there are few prognosticators who are willing to divine how that demographic surge is to be absorbed, particularly if greater female employment is an objective.

*[Read the on September 19.]

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Since Mohammed Morsi’s ouster, western states have been caught in a balancing act between normative criticism and pragmatic interest in Egypt’s stability. The relationship with the new actors in power in Cairo is tense. Interim Prime Minister Hazem al-Beblawi called it a “mistake” that the United States cancelled a joint military exercise, while it discusses suspending military aid. In the end, he claimed, Cairo can do without Washington’s support.

As an alternative, al-Beblawi put Moscow into play whose military support, according to him, had saved Egypt’s survival in the past. With this, he must have been referring to the Nasser-era of the 1950s and 60s, when Egypt held strong ties with the Soviet Union.

The Egyptian interim government’s interest in Moscow should not be overestimated. Egyptian authorities primarily aim to get concessions from Washington by playing the Russia-card. One cannot expect a clear expansion of economic and political cooperation with Russia, let alone a profound reorientation towards Moscow. Russia does not have enough to offer for that.

The Weak Economic Foundation

Economically, Moscow is ranked seventh with a 2.8% share of Egypt’s external trade – far behind the EU (23%), but also China (8%), the US (7%), and Turkey and Saudi Arabia (both 4%). Russia only holds a leading position in two areas: Moscow is Egypt’s most important wheat supplier and also holds the largest share of tourists, with over two million annual travelers to the country. If the travel warning, issued by the Russian Foreign Ministry in mid-August, is upheld, Egypt’s most important economic sector could be severely hit.

Apart from that, the economic foundation of Russian-Egyptian relations is weak. Most of all, Moscow lacks cooperation projects of strategic importance through which it could gain political influence. There is potential for that in the realm of civil nuclear energy, as well as in the arms sector.

In both areas, Russia is among the world’s biggest suppliers. In April, Morsi had proposed to Moscow to assist with the construction of the first planned nuclear power plant, as well as the development of Egyptian uranium deposits. Similar proposals existed during the Mubarak-era. However, as long as it remains unclear as to whether Cairo, in the face of economic troubles, can manage the first steps into nuclear power, this potential of a strategic cooperation remains idle.

Similarly, prospects for a stronger cooperation in the arms sector – mentioned by al-Beblawi – should not be overestimated. Even if the new rulers in Cairo cooperate with Moscow more closely in the military technology sector, Russia could only fill in a niche position in the medium-term future. The Egyptian military, when it comes to equipment and training, is too oriented towards Washington. Additionally, Russia, in contrast to the US, will not be able to finance cooperation projects in the arms sector and beyond on a large scale.

The interim government will not have forgotten how, at the summit with Putin, Morsi failed with his request for a credit line of $2 billion. The Gulf monarchies clearly present more attractive financiers for Cairo.

Russia: A More Active Role?

Even though al-Beblawi’s statements do not signal the start of a substantial deepening of Russian-Egyptian relations, they are interpreted in Moscow as an important political victory. They demonstrate that the perception of Russia in the region has changed.

Until recently, it looked like Moscow had lost the majority of its regained influence – for which it worked hard since the start of the new century – during the Arab Spring. In Libya, Russia decided to back the opposition too late. Moreover, its role as a protecting power of the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria has Russia's strained relations with most regional leaders and societies.

The prophecy of doom about Russian self-isolation is premature, however. Although the relationship with Gulf monarchies remains charged, Moscow has managed to limit the damage with Turkey, Jordan, and Libya by fostering political dialogue and cooperation in the economic realm.

In the Arab world, Moscow employs a policy which combines the defense of certain international principles – such as non-interference in domestic affairs – with great flexibility towards changing domestic power configurations and pragmatic interest-driven policies. This way, Moscow is making an effort to create a political dialogue with the respective people in power, whether that is the Muslim Brotherhood or the military. The fact that President Vladimir Putin invited Morsi to the summit is quite remarkable, considering that the Brotherhood has been outlawed in Russia since 2003 and dubbed as a terrorist organization due to its support for Chechen rebels. After Morsi’s fall, the Kremlin, in line with its non-interference policy, stayed away from criticism of the Egyptian military’s actions.

The fact that Moscow is once again perceived as strong by Egypt and the Arab world, and that it was able to make up for its initial political losses, not only comes to the benefit of Russia. Indeed, Russia profits from the lack of unity as well as the mistakes of western nations. If Russia wants to consolidate the trend of its return to the Middle East, it must not act primarily as a blockading power. Rather, it has to actively contribute to the solution of regional problems like Syria, Israel-Palestine and the Iranian standoff.

*[This article was originally published by , and translated from German to English by .]

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The 2011 fall of Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi and the subsequent breakdown in order in Libya, has been a major contributor to the instability plaguing large swaths of the Sahel region and Northwest Africa. In particular, the flow of weapons, such as a multitude of small arms and light weapons (SALW) and explosives, from liberated Libyan military stockpiles into the surrounding countries has galvanized existing political opposition currents, separatist movements, and transnational militant groups.

Much of the concern regarding the impact of weapons proliferation out of Libya emphasizes the potential threat of man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS) falling into the hands of radical Islamist militant groups, such as al-Qaeda or one of its regional or international affiliates. In light of the persistent threat of international terrorism as it relates to commercial air travel, such concerns remain valid. Yet it has been the residual impact of the proliferation of SALW and explosives on regional stability and security, that has posed the most immediate threats to what is an already precarious political and security environment.

Mali, which has experienced severe unrest since January 2012 – including ethnic Tuareg-led insurrections, radical Islamist insurgency, and a military-led coup d’état – has been the most dramatic example of the region’s post-Qaddafi volatility; Chad and Niger have also been forced to deal with fallout from the Libyan revolt. Algeria has experienced a noticeable uptick of violence, including the January 2013 attack against the Tigantourine natural gas facility in Amenas in eastern Algeria along the Algerian-Libyan border. The attack at Amenas was orchestrated by militants associated with an offshoot of al-Qaeda’s North African affiliate, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), known as al-Mulathameen (The Masked Ones). Nigeria believes that radical Islamist militants affiliated with Boko Haram have also been emboldened by their access to Libyan arms. While lying outside of the geographic space that is the subject of this analysis, the increase in violence in Egypt’s Sinai region is also being partially attributed to the influx of smuggled Libyan arms into Egyptian territory.

To date, the proliferation of Libyan weapons has further militarized numerous existing political opposition and radical movements and afforded opportunities for other violent and irregular actors to pursue their own objectives. Qaddafi’s fall was followed by a troubled political transition that remains marred by violence between rival factions and militias, resulting in a power vacuum in one of the region’s most militarized states. As Libya struggles to consolidate its domestic political institutions and establish some semblance of law and order, SALW and explosives proliferation stemming from within its borders will continue unabated. Consequently, the countries lying within the Sahel and Northwest Africa will continue to have their security undermined by developments in Libya. 

Libyan Weapons: Galvanizing Violence

Despite the concerns surrounding the disposition of Libya’s arsenal of MANPADS, there is no concrete evidence that any militants present in the region – radical Islamist or otherwise – have procured the weapons systems. Nevertheless, the potential threats associated with MANPADS continue to attract much of the attention in regards to proliferation. These worries were exacerbated by documents discovered in Libya in September 2011, indicating that Russia had provided Qaddafi with several hundred advanced – and unaccounted for – SA-24 “Grinch” surface-to-air missiles. In March 2011, Chad’s President Idriss Deby claimed that Libyan MANPADS had entered Chad and Niger. Malian officials echoed Deby’s claims. A number of unconfirmed reports circulated in regional media outlets claimed that various North African regional militant groups had acquired MANPADS in 2012 and 2013. Algerian officials reported in February 2013 that they confiscated numerous Russian surface-to-air missile systems in Algeria’s southern regions.

But it is the proliferation of more prosaic weapons systems – essentially a diverse array of SALW and explosives – that have most actively contributed to the recent wave of unrest and instability in the Sahel and Northwest Africa. An assortment of Libyan weapons started entering neighboring countries soon after the outbreak of civil war in Libya. In early 2011, assault rifles, ammunition, mortars, mines, and plastic explosives began crossing Libya’s borders into Algeria, Egypt, Niger, and Mali. In April 2011, regional media reports claimed that pickup trucks carrying arms, ammunition, and explosives from eastern Libya had crossed into Mali via Chad and Niger.

Since 2011, concerned officials have repeatedly claimed that Libyan weapons and stockpiles of plastic explosives are being distributed to militants in Niger, Algeria, Nigeria, and elsewhere. Established organized criminal and illicit trafficking networks traversing the Sahel’s ancient East-West trade routes, and associated networks that link the north to the south, are facilitating this trend. The porous borders throughout the territories in question also help ensure that the relative free flow of illicit trade continues unimpeded. The increasing availability of arms has also provided aspiring militants with the opportunity to establish their own fringe factions. Weapons traffickers are also benefiting from the additional sources of supply and increasingly diverse selections of arms.

Mali, Chad, and Niger

This is most evident in Mali. The political leadership in Bamako has long disenfranchised Mali’s Tuaregs, a nomadic population that is related to the indigenous Berber peoples of North Africa and the Sahel region. Qaddafi employed thousands of Tuareg mercenaries from Mail, Niger, and Chad to bolster the Libyan military while fortifying his own power base within the Libyan security apparatus. Following the collapse of his regime, the repatriation of these generally well trained, heavily armed, often battle hardened, and politicized Tuaregs remains a major challenge. In January 2012, a separatist Tuareg rebellion broke out in northern Mali. In March 2012, Malian military officers launched a coup against the government of President Amadou Toumani, in response to what they claimed was the mismanagement of the military with the rebellion. By April 2012, Tuareg rebels, allied with a variety of Islamist militants, had gained control of most of northern Mali, prompting a joint French-Malian military campaign to recapture the north in January 2013.

Despite French and Malian efforts, northern Mali remains a militant stronghold. Tuareg separatist groups such as the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), the Arab Movement of Azawad (MAA), and the Islamic Movement of Azawad (MIA) exist alongside – and increasingly clash with – regional Islamist extremist groups such as AQIM, the AQIM-affiliated Movement of Jihad and Oneness in West Africa (MUJAO), Ansar al-Dine (AAD), among others. For instance, MIA is a splinter group of AAD. The MIA broke from AAD in January 2013 and subsequently renounced its tactics and ties to AQIM. Similarly, MAA was formed as a secular alternative to the more Islamist-oriented MNLA. These groups – all of whom have benefitted from the influx of weapons from liberated Libyan caches – have created an atmosphere of ongoing violence in Mali, complicating the region’s prospects for stability.

The specter of anti-government violence also haunts Chad. The Union of Resistance Forces (UFR) threatened in March to renew its militant campaign against the Deby regime despite having agreed to lay down its arms in 2010. There has been speculation that arms from Libya have encouraged the UFR’s saber rattling, and Deby – who has survived multiple coups, including an alleged attempt by two generals and two legislators to take over the country this past May – has accused Libya of harboring UFR rebels.

Niger also faces an uncertain future in the wake of the Libyan collapse. In May, MUJAO militants launched a suicide bombing – the first attack of its kind in Niger – against a Nigerien army base and French uranium mine operated by Areva in northern Niger. The group claimed that the operation was designed to punish Niamey for deploying a contingent of peacekeepers to Mali. The attacks, which Niger claimed were launched from Libya, raised concerns in both Niger and Europe about the safety of Niger’s uranium deposits; France, which derives the majority of its electricity from nuclear power, receives about 40 percent of its uranium from Niger. Niger is also reported to possess significant oil deposits, and has a history of rebel-led violence directed at its uranium and oil sector. Since 2007, the Tuareg-based Niger Movement for Justice (MNJ) has threatened to attack oil and uranium operations in the country, unless Niamey provides the MNJ with a greater share of national energy revenues. MNJ has kidnapped Chinese and French workers at oil and uranium facilities, and many fear that the instability in Libya will provide the MNJ with additional resources and an increased operational capacity.

Organized Crime and Regional Smuggling Networks

As the number of militant groups in the region grows, the demand for weapons increases, bolstering the illicit trade networks that have existed alongside legitimate trade relationships in the region for years. The Sahel and Northwest Africa are focal points of arms trafficking since the 1990s, and since the early 2000s, narcotics trafficking – especially of cocaine and cannabis resin – has been on the rise. The region in question is widely touted as a global hub of narcotics trafficking that encompasses links to Latin America and the Caribbean, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Europe. Organized criminal networks, which often incorporate networks of underpaid and corrupt government officials and regional security personnel, have exploited the growing instability to expand their operations, assisted by the flood of Libyan weapons into the region.

Risks

The current Tuareg separatist and radical Islamist-led violence in the Sahel and Northwest Africa is unlikely to recede in the near-term. The desperate poverty of the region, where drought and expanding desertification have ravaged the agrarian economy and frequent kidnappings have decimated the foreign tourist trade, provides few legitimate and viable employment opportunities to Tuareg mercenaries returning from years of service – and employment – in Libya. These populations have been ignored and marginalized by their governments for decades, resulting in extreme resentment and a steady process of politicization.

Qaddafi was in power for over 40 years, and his absence is being felt on many levels. Despite his government’s isolation from the larger Arab and Western worlds, the former Libyan army colonel actively cultivated close ties with his African neighbors to the south, using Libya’s considerable oil wealth to promote infrastructure development projects, broker peace deals, and provide employment to impoverished and disenfranchised minority groups. Libya’s new provisional government is unlikely – and largely unable – to continue Qaddafi’s policies towards Libya’s African neighbors, policies on which many of those neighbors had come to depend economically, politically, and socially. This, combined with the influx of Libyan SALW and explosives into the region and the subsequent strengthening of numerous anti-government and separatist militant groups, clouds the security, political, and economic outlook for the Sahel and Northwest Africa.

*[This article, originally published with the title, "," has been reproduced with the permission of .  Copyright 2013 Helios Global, Inc.]

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With the growing onslaught of ethnic and minority conflicts in much of the emerging world, it often appears that we are on the edge of shaking out the structure of the Westphalian state system without a clear notion of what is to come. More than a dozen countries in the Middle East and North Africa, South Asia, and Latin America are going through significant crises in terms of governance and the emergence of new players in the political space. While the likelihood of more Sudan/South Sudan or Yugoslavia splits is not clear, the options for a greater number of federations and autonomous units cannot be ignored.

Framing the Discussion

A recent publication helps frame a strategic discussion about avoiding the next Egypt or Mali by recognizing what promotes national stability and integrity. “Pathways to Freedom: Political and Economic Lessons from Democratic Transitions” is a published by the Council on Foreign Relations, edited by Isobel Coleman and Terra Lawson-Remer. It is useful both for what it says and what it cannot. Based on the case studies in the collection, the generalizations offered in the first chapter, “Statistical Evidence,” put several assumptions about trends in national development under the microscope. Its conclusion:

“Quantitative evidence has been relatively successful in explaining long-run democratic trajectories, but it cannot predict revolutions or coups in the short term, and it is impossible to know when or how particular reforms might happen. Three priorities emerge from quantitative analysis… increasing the capacity for nonviolent protests against autocratic regimes… support for multiparty elections… maximizing access to mass media… to safeguard democratic progress already achieved… in the short run, promoting democracy and prosperity may be incompatible.”

The final point is unfortunately underscored by the continuing unrest in Arab countries where greater employment opportunities have yet to be achieved.

Recommendations

Apropos, this observation is the first recommendation in the final chapter: “New democratic governments should move quickly to adopt policies aimed at materially improving the lives of the poor and dealing with unemployment,” with the caveat “without creating dependency on unsustainable and distortionary economic policies in the longer term.” In Egypt, Libya, or elsewhere, the mantra of jobs, jobs, jobs has yet to dominate the debate within governments, although it is certainly the priority on the Arab street. Employment and more equitable distribution of subsidies will not disappear from the agenda despite the difficulties of implementation.

The second recommendation focuses on judicial reform. “Rule of law reforms that establish a fair and level playing field and that prevents elites from bending the rules to serve their interests are critical.” Again, a telling caveat: do not use outside models; rather work “with local partners to bolster domestic pressures for reforms… take a bottom-up, capacity-building approach that supports the ability of average citizens to exercise their rights and the legal system’s ability to implement laws consistently and fairly.” Without an integrative model that is respectful of local jurisprudence and without ensuring that citizens can employ the law as it is intended, judicial reform may become a hollow exercise. 

I particularly find the third recommendation instructive and reasonable for start-up governments. “Transitional countries should decentralize in ways that help deepen and sustain democratization efforts.” It is important that governments are present in a positive way in people’s lives. Investing in a higher degree of social services has two immediate benefits: it creates jobs for the new service providers, who should be recruited from and trained in local communities; and it shrinks the space for opportunities for services provided by forces that may not support the inclusive goals of the new regime.

The fourth recommendation takes a glass-half-full perspective on elections. “Conducting even flawed elections under authoritarian governments is worthwhile,” primarily because they give the outside world an opportunity to critique the process and give local groups experience in organizing. One can see this clearly in the ability of the Islamic parties, particularly those like Morocco’s PJD, which spent time as an opposition party, quickly seizing center stage, as broad political reforms are implemented.

The Role of the International Community

The report also addresses positive actions by the international community, including “support[ing] civil society and independent media under authoritarian regimes through civic exchanges, capacity building, and bottom-up technology transfers.” There is a strong economic support role for technology transfer, technical assistance, sharing best practices, and supporting civil society empowerment. The report notes: “Foreign governments and international and regional organizations must strive to compensate for bad [neighbors] by mobilizing to give domestic democratic reformers support in economic restructuring and investing for inclusive growth… access to preferential trade, investment, and security agreements should be conditioned on the implementation of homegrown governance reforms that improve accountability in the long term.” A particularly important caveat addresses the need to support the growth of a middle class “rather than promote economic ties that increase the overall growth and wealth but concentrate these gains in the hands of elites.”

The details in the report are more robust than what is summarized here, and the whole thing is worth reading for its analytics and as a measure of policy options being pursued by the US in the Middle East and elsewhere. The report closes with the following: “Even with the best circumstances and wisest decisions by policymakers and publics, the road to democratic consolidation is long and difficult. But there are no failed aspirations for human freedom: dreams of liberty and opportunity are sometimes long deferred, but they cannot be forever denied.”

Amen to that. The current almost chaos-like atmosphere in Egypt, the unfinished business in Syria, Tunisia, Yemen, Bahrain, and Libya, and the uncertainty in Lebanon, all point to the difficulties of returning to the last century’s rule by oligarchies. While today’s events may be full of risk, the generational changes evolving will more clearly reflect the will of the people and institutions that emerge.

*[This article was produced in collaboration with , and represents the views of the author and not the perspectives of the Moroccan American Trade & Investment Center.]

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The quirky Emir of Qatar since the mid-1990s, Sheikh Hamad bin Issa al-Thani, stepped down in favor of his fourth son, Tamim, 33, on Tuesday morning. It is a historical step, insofar as it might form a precedent in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) of six Gulf sheikhdoms — heretofore mainly ruled by old men.

Al Jazeera

Sheikh Hamad presided over the growth of Qatari GDP from $8 billion annually in 1996, to $174 billion a year, today. The Qatari citizen population is only about 250,000, making the peninsula the wealthiest per capita in the world (mainly based on natural gas exports). Sheikh Hamad innovated in allowing the Al Jazeera satellite news channel to be founded and to operate relatively independently. It changed Arab television journalism forever, airing multiple points of views on key issues and allowing critics of the various Arab regimes to be heard. Al Jazeera gave a platform to the revolutionaries of 2011, at a time when local Tunisian, Egyptian or Libyan media attempted to downplay the revolutionary youth movements. Qatar also began playing a mediating role in disputes in the region, as when it negotiated a truce in 2008 between the Shiite Hezbollah and its Sunni opposition in Lebanon.

In the past two years, Qatar’s reputation has suffered among many Arab youth because of its backing for the religious Right (Ennahda in Tunisia, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Syria and elsewhere). Qatar has been a hawk on Syria, seeking the overthrow of the Baathist regime of Bashar al-Assad and being willing to arm even radical Sunni groups who have affiliated with al-Qaeda. On the other hand, its Arabic-language television station has been quiet about the crackdown on Shiite protesters in Bahrain by a Sunni monarchy. Sheikh Hamad once had a reputation for even-handedness, which in recent years he has squandered in pursuit of the spread of Sunni fundamentalism in the region. Likewise, the imprisonment of a Qatari poet for 15 years for insulting the ruling family pointed to a deep hypocrisy, since Al Jazeera had pointedly criticized Hosni Mubarak in Egypt for his crackdown on dissent and criticism of his regime.

Sheikh Hamad explicitly made reference to the creative role of Arab youth in recent years, saying:

“Our young [people] have proven over the past years that they are a people of resolve and fortitude; capable of accommodating the spirit of their time; realising its necessities fully and profoundly; coping with its newest; and above all contributing by their original thinking and creative initiatives. Thanks to all this, I recall the words of the fourth Caliph, Ali bin Abi Taleb, may Allah be pleased with him, who said: ‘Teach your children other than that what you were taught; as they are created for a time other than yours.’”

The absolute ruler of a Gulf sheikhdom urged Generation Y to put their faith in science (al-ulum, and not just "knowledge" as the official translation has it):

“The future lies ahead of you, the children of this homeland, as you usher into a new era where young leadership hoists the banner; bearing in mind the aspirations of future generations; working restlessly and relentlessly to achieve them, seeking guidance and support from God first and from the citizens; deriving force from the experience gained in running the country’s affairs; and the profound knowledge of realities in our region, particularly the Arab World. While I am certain you are up to the responsibility, I urge you to fear God by seeking knowledge and working hard; let [the sciences] be the beacon lighting your path; helping you build the future of the nation to its best; by knowledge emerge able generations, capable of shouldering responsibilities and embracing the straight right path.”

While Sheikh Hamad is among the more interesting political minds in the Middle East, and he has helped shake the region up in ways that are often positive, there are a number of potential steps his successor could take that would be truly revolutionary.

The New Emir

Sheikh Tamim will likely revive the plan to move to an elected consultative assembly. But what would really change the Gulf would be for him to accept becoming a constitutional monarch. Kuwait was, six years ago, the closest of the GCC countries to that form of government, but it has become much more authoritarian. It is a hard sell for Qatar to promote democracy elsewhere in the Arab world, yet to lack it at home in Doha.

Likewise, the GCC countries suffer from a local labor shortage produced by their vast hydrocarbon wealth, which generates the need for workers and for businesses beyond what local populations can supply. Millions of Indians, Sri Lankans, Pakistanis, Filipinos and others have flooded into the region. Qatar’s population is 1.8 million, but about 1.5 million of that consists of guest workers. Guest workers in the Gulf states most often need an in-country patron or kafeel, whose relationship to them can often be exploitative. Even workers from India or the Philippines who have lived for many years in a Gulf country are limited to relatively short-term visas. They can easily be deported or denied renewal of their visa, which is how any concerted attempt at workplace unionization or strikes are dealt with. There is typically no path to citizenship for these guest workers, even if they live in a GCC country all their lives.

Using Qatar’s natural gas wealth as a platform on which to pursue renewable energy, its export to energy-hungry Pakistan and India would help firm up Qatar’s future in a world where hydrocarbons are likely to decline in value. Qatar is vulnerable to losing coastline if the seas rise three or four feet in this century, as is expected because of climate change.

So another really important innovation Sheikh Tamim could pursue would be to offer citizenship to long-time residents, to regularize immigration laws and establish a path to citizenship for immigrants, and to allow unions, strikes and more justice for the workers who are making Doha run.

This step, in turn, would require a national educational system that could induct the immigrants into a Qatari national identity.

A return of Al Jazeera to more even-handed editorial policies would increase Qatar’s prestige.

Sheikh Tamim would raise his country’s esteem in the eyes of the world if he pardoned poet Muhammad al-Ajami and established genuine freedom of speech in the country. Qatar achieved its current stature by demanding more open societies elsewhere in the Arab world. It risks undermining those achievements by being seen as hypocritical.

And a return of Qatar to its 2008 role of mediator and peace-maker would benefit it and the region. Muslim Brotherhood rule in Egypt has been a disaster, and the Sunni radicals in Syria are damaging the reputation and prospects of the rebels there. For Doha to pick winners so boldly risks a backlash if they don’t do well. And violent interventions like that in Syria could someday backfire by attracting violence to Doha.

*[This article was originally published by Juan Cole’s .]

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The victory of the Assad regime and Hezbollah in the month-long battle over Al-Qusayr, located near Lebanon’s northern border, was marked in the southern district of Beirut, a predominately Shi’ite area and Hezbollah stronghold, with volleys of gunfire and great celebrations. Sheikh Naem Qassem, deputy of Hezbollah’s leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, called the victory a decisive moment for the Assad regime in the ongoing civil war.

It was quite ironic that Syrian authorities issued a warning on June 2, against traveling to Turkey because of a “deteriorating security situation” in the country — in reference to the wide-spread protests. The Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is a staunch opponent of Bashar Al-Assad and an unequivocal supporter of the Syrian opposition. During his recent visit to Washington, Erdogan advocated for the removal of the Syrian president.

In light of recent developments, the appropriate question one should now ask is whether the tide of the Syrian Civil War is turning in favor of the Assad regime? My prediction, based on the apparent facts and turn of events, is in the affirmative.

Miscalculation of the Syrian situation

Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar appear to have grossly underestimated the resolve and staying power of the Assad regime and its allies, as proven by the turning of events in the civil war on four pivotal counts:

1. The power of the Assad regime; 
2. The solid commitments and the relentless backing of the Assad regime by Russia and Iran;
3. The West's resolve to avoid any direct military intervention in Syria, in light of what happened in Libya;
4. The “Spoiling” Salafist factor

Frequent official declarations by high-ranking Western and Turkish decision makers gave the impression that Assad’s days were numbered. Naive observers, including myself, thought that the Assad regime was inevitably doomed and began to ponder over a possible exit strategy for the Syrian president.

The strong loyalty and command that the Assad regime enjoys over a well-groomed military and security apparatus did not enter the calculations of the Saudi-Qatari regimes, as well as Turkey's Erdogan. From the start of the conflict, some political analysts have repeated the rhetoric by Assad propagandists that the defection of some Syrian soldiers was actually a sign of revitalization, separating the wheat from the chafe and making the Syrian army more cohesive and staunchly committed.

This, according to the Assad regime’s line, has left the Syrian army with truly committed government loyalists — with most of the Syrian army remaining intact. 

Assad’s Allies

The Russians, humiliated and angered by NATO’s direct military intervention in Libya, dug in its heels and made it clear to all concerned that Syria would not be another Libya and that Russia would back the Assad regime to the very end. In the context of its awakening to a new status and role on the world stage, Russia considers the future of Syria, with the potential threat of rising Salafism, to be of direct concern for Moscow.

For Iran, too much is at stake if the Assad regime falls. Tehran enjoys a close strategic alliance with Syria, which is well conceived and has been fostered for decades. The Assad regime is considered to be a vital link in the strategic Iran-Iraq-Syria-Hezbollah axis that was starting to gain ground as a counterbalancing in a Middle East seen as a Western sphere of influence.

Failed Predictions

Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar seem to have calculated that NATO and the West would ultimately intervene militarily in Syria as they did in Libya, thus tipping the balance in favor of the opposition. They figured that, as military confrontations inside Syria intensified, NATO and the West would be tempted to throw their full weight behind the Syrian insurgents, thereby putting an end to the Assad regime.

Several factors appear to have caused Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar’s calculations to seriously falter: 

• The Libyan war proved logistically very demanding for NATO and the West, especially in the context of having experienced two protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan;
• Russia remains steadfast in their diplomatic and material support for the Syrian regime;
• Possibly most importantly, Salafist fighters have risen to the forefront and become the dominant opposition force in Syria;

After the decision to turn peaceful protests into an armed struggle was backed by the West, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, tens of thousands of volunteer Salafists poured into Syria from all corners of the region to join the Syrian opposition. This came as a surprise to some in the West who supported anti-government forces. The West dreaded the fact that the tide of the armed struggle in Syria was increasingly turning in favor of an opposition that has been dominated by Salafists, often considered as Al-Qaeda affiliates.

The lull that marked the Syrian-Israeli borders for many decades, since the negotiated ceasefire in 1974, could flare up if the Syrian opposition succeeds in toppling the Assad regime with Salafists enjoying the upper hand.

Equal concerns and a change of heart were expressed by Saudi authorities in unequivocal statements made by Foreign Minister Prince Saud El-Faysal. He originally called for turning the peaceful protests in Syria into an armed struggle, and belatedly called for a negotiated peace settlement.

The Saudis have been fighting Al-Qaeda terrorism for over a decade. Consequently, Saudi Arabia dreads seeing Syria fall into the hands of Salafists. However, the situation remains ambivalent and paradoxical, as prominent Sunni clergymen in Saudi Arabia and Qatar have been calling for jihad in Syria to uproot who they call “heretics.”

The Hezbollah-Assad Alliance

The victory of the Assad-Hezbollah alliance in Al-Qusayr, according to some political analysts, ushers in a new era by tipping the balance in favor of the Assad regime. The overt alliance between Assad forces and Hezbollah fighters adds an element of resilience to the military repertoire of the Syrian regime. All the major arteries to Damascus and other strategic Syrian cities, long in the hands of the Syrian opposition, appear to have now been cleared by the pro-Assad military alliance. This is considered as crucial by some security analysts, especially since both sides mustered much of their military forces to achieve a decisive victory in Al-Qusayr.   

The open participation of Hezbollah fighters with the Syrian army at the Syrian-Lebanese border, tends to mix the cards and permanently blurs the distinction of sovereignty between the two countries. This reignites Syrian meddling and control of Lebanon’s internal politics, eight years after the Syrian army withdrew from Lebanon in 2005.

Hezbollah’s overt involvement in the Syrian conflict will also greatly complicate the fragile Lebanese political and security landscape, which is founded on the delicate balance of tribal factions — constituting the Lebanese political system of power sharing. This could very well bear far-reaching consequences for the security situation in Lebanon, as other Lebanese political factions abhor their experience of the long years of Syrian occupation and interference in country’s domestic politics.

The military alliance between Hezbollah and the Syrian regime is widely interpreted as having left no doubt that Syria’s political influence and role in Lebanese politics will once again be more direct.

Overall, the recent developments in Syria demonstrate the complex nature of the conflict, as several supporters of the armed rebellion have not been able to predict the recent turn of events.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Security related issues and natural resources are of core concern for Western nations in the Middle East and North Africa. As uprisings and civil wars have raged on, accusations of double standards have often been lamented upon the US, UK, and France.

While the US has supported the right to peaceful protest in nations such as Egypt and Tunisia, and militarily backed anti-Qaddafi rebels in Libya with NATO, they showed reluctance to support civil political movements in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. Strategic geopolitical interests — such as the presence of the US Navy’s 5th fleet in Bahrain and the important shipping lane called the Strait of Hormuz — essentially dictate US foreign policy in the Gulf. It is for this reason that the US continues to support the Bahraini and Saudi Arabian monarchies despite the repression of their populations.

The European Union’s (EU) interests in the region are dominated by concerns over security issues, migration, and natural resources. With southern Europe’s close proximity to North Africa, political unrest and conflict in Libya, Tunisia, and even Morocco was, and continues to be, particularly worrisome for the EU. The unrest in Tunisia, between December 2010 and January 2011, infamously prompted the French foreign minister to  sending French police to Tunisia in order to crush the uprising against long-time ally Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali.

As the EU continues to struggle with the economic crisis, political unrest in North Africa would likely result in further illegal migration to European states. In addition to migration issues, there are concerns over the smuggling of weapons and drugs from North-West Africa to Europe. Furthermore, any bolstering of extremist groups like Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and Ansar Al-Sharia threatens the security of natural resources in Algeria and Libya, which would undoubtedly send shockwaves throughout Europe with increased oil and gas prices.

In sum, the EU desires a stable region to ensure strong economic and trade relations with their southern neighbors. It also wants to ensure that security issues do not spill over to Europe or lead to mass migration to its member states.

Beyond the United States’ strategic interests in the Arabian Peninsula with regards to natural resources and counterterrorism, particularly with Yemen’s Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Washington’s other core concern in the Middle East is the security of Israel.

During his first term, US President Barack Obama failed to make any progress with the Israeli-Palestinian peace process as talks collapsed in 2010 over a settlement row between Tel Aviv and Ramallah. Throughout his time in office, the president has repeatedly stressed America’s commitment to Israel’s security. With the appointment of Secretary of State John Kerry, the US president is expected to once again try and bring the Israelis and Palestinians back to the negotiating table.

, vice president of the Institute of Peace and Development, speaks to 51�Թ�’s  and  about Western double standards, socioeconomic development in North Africa and the role of the EU, and the future of the US-Israeli relationship.

Abul-Hasanat Siddique: Does the United States hold double standards by backing democratic reform in select nations, while supporting autocratic regimes in countries like Saudi Arabia and Bahrain? 

Yana Korobko: The politics of double standards is the basis of the American strategy in the Middle East, which works for its own benefits. In what concerns Syria, the American administration is silent because any harsh gesture from the side of the White House will lead to a new splash of violence in the region, which Israel does not wish for; neither does it want the instability, which it might trigger off in the neighborhood.

Washington’s reaction concerning the protests in Yemen was only demonstrated through the prism of what they might mean for the fight against Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and Saudi Arabia.

Bahrain is the location of the US Navy’s 5th fleet. The loss of control over Bahrain means the loss of control over the Strait of Hormuz. There is no doubt that the US defense base in Bahrain is strategic to American foreign interests.

Concerning the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, it does not matter whether protests occur there from time to time. The US does not intend to pay any public attention to them as long as Riyadh remains America’s strongest ally in the Gulf. Therefore, Washington adopts individual behavior in each given case and is not reluctant to change the existing status quo in the Gulf if that is in America’s favor.

Manuel Langendorf: Considering the rise to power of Islamist movements in countries like Egypt and Tunisia, how do you think this phenomenon has influenced Arab-Western relations?

Korobko: With the rise to power of Islamist governments, their relations with the West have become, indeed, ambivalent. On the one hand, the region is strategically important for Washington, not only in terms of economic interests, but also taking in account that Israel, a vital US ally, is located there. On the other hand, such US political partners like Egypt and Tunisia are playing a contradictory role now. And Washington has to deal with a religious dictatorship in accordance to a scenario that is different from what the one they expected.

Under these circumstances, the US is developing a new politics in the Middle East with new rules and diplomatic tactics, which would be more precautious, as the dialogue with the Islamist governments is grounded on a strong base of traditional Islam; that is what the majority of the Arab populations voted for. Therefore, if Washington aspires to promote democracy in the Middle East, it should not do so regardless of the religious factor but, first and foremost, by taking it into primary consideration, as it is becoming much more influential in the US-Arab relations than ever before.

Langendorf: Has the rise of Islamist movements, in several cases replacing secular dictatorships, influenced interfaith dialogue between Western states and the region? 

Korobko: The interfaith dialogue has always been a strong tool for developing tolerance between the different continents on the cultural level, as its chief principle is comprehension despite all differences: religious, social, and political. Consequently, the interfaith dialogue will go on regardless of the current policy-making transformations. It’s between people, and not political programs.

Langendorf: In light of energy imports, and legal and illegal immigration from North Africa, what is your view on the EU’s past policies over these issues?

Korobko: For many years, Europe has been interested in the immigrant’s labor, which is beneficial both for the employers and the employees. That is why, until recent times, EU countries have not been actively opposing the flows of immigrant workers coming from outside of Europe. However, with the adoption of the so-called “New Integration Strategy in the Mediterranean” (1992), the immigration policies of European states have become governed by quotas. The quotas reduced the annual number of migrants and due to security reasons, this figure only increased over time.

The threats to security became real at different levels. It is, on the one hand, the protection of the host states and their citizens, and on the other hand, the safety of migrants (low salaries, long working hours, and no health assurances). Nowadays, European migration legislation is facing new realities, which cannot be easily and completely subordinated only to regulation by single states. They need a complex approach within international cooperation.

Siddique: What should the EU do to help encourage socioeconomic reform in North Africa? Will genuine change in the Maghreb help reduce migration to Southern Europe?

Korobko: Probably the only state in North Africa that has been able to offer both stability and introduce some light manifestations of democratic reforms in return for EU aid is Morocco. With its European outlook and close economic and commercial connection with EU states, Rabat highly values its privileged status with Brussels. To ensure this cooperation continues fulfilling the common objectives, it should be adjusted to the most urgent needs of the Moroccan society, notably:

• Development of social policies
• Economic modernization
• Institutional support
• Good governance and the protection of human rights
• Environmental safety

Certainly, the aid given by the EU to Morocco has accelerated the reforms inside the kingdom. So far, however, they have been implemented with extremely small steps, or not implemented at all. Only if a serious attitude is adapted towards democratization will there be a reduction in migration flows coming from the African continent to the EU, and thus the regional situation will stabilize.

Langendorf: Regarding the United States, how do you see the future of US-Israeli relations?

Korobko: The recent visit of President Obama to the Middle East commenced with a reassuring speech concerning the unchanging role of Israel as a firm and solid partner of the US in the region. This means that the previous policy line of US-Israeli relations is likely to continue during Obama’s second term. With help of America’s good services, negotiations between Israel and Palestine have a chance to be renewed. However, the main question is not the reopening of talks, but their effectiveness. Sometimes, the whole negotiation process serves only one aim: the adjournment of the final resolution if it serves the purposes of the involved parties. As history shows, preserving the whole Middle East in suspense gives Washington an uncommon advantage of controlling and dominating every single pulsation of the region.

*[Note: This article was produced in partnership with the .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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