Libya: Bani Walid surrounded (again)

Libyan National Transitional Council (NTC) fighters gather at an outpost south of Bani Walid, in October 2011.

According to Punch news “A powerful sense of deja vu grips the men of Libya’s national guard as they mass for battle in the freezing desert outside Bani Walid, the new frontline of a war most had thought was long over”.

The town, one of the last pro-Gaddafi redoubts to hold out against the rebels, and home to the powerful Warfalla tribe, became a “no-go area for government units and the militias, drawn from units across Libya, that are ready to launch a new offensive unless local leaders allow them back in – and round-up war crimes suspects”.

Though the fighters agree with the UN assessment that this is not part of a pro-Gaddafi uprising they claim that there are hundreds of pro-Gaddafi persons in that town which have committed crimes. And this seems to be the real issue. In the well informed article of the Foreign Policy “The Lesson of Bani Walid”, the town is described as a “a refuge for the waifs and strays of the former Gaddafi administration who are on the war crimes lists of other cities”. When a pro-government unit in the town had begun to arrest them on Monday their base was attacked by a local clan. Four soldiers were killed, the rest fled, and the suspects were set free.

The expelled commander of the "28th of May" brigade, Imbarak al-Futmani said in an interview with Reuters at his desert camp near Sadada, 50 km east of Bani Walid, that “"It is our right to reenter Bani Walid and nobody can prevent us”. In his view "These pro-Gaddafis, they see us a rats, like Gaddafi did," "they are murderers and criminals, they will never intergrate into the new Libya because they know they will face justice now".

Though he is skeptical of any peaceful solution predicting more violence ahead he agreed to the Libya’s PM directions to hold off attacks to allow civilians to leave the town and, hopefully, for the assailants to surrender.

According to the Doctors Without Borders and Amnesty International, some 8,500 people accused as Gaddafi’s supporters, are detained without any legal right, tortured, denied medical care, “beaten for hours with whips, cables, plastic hoses, metal chains and bars and wooden sticks, and given electric shocks with live wires and Taser-like electro-shock weapons”, while “several detainees have died in the custody of armed militias in and around Tripoli and Misratah in circumstances that suggest torture”. Obviously the option to get arrested is grave as there is not any legal system in the Post – Gaddafi Libya, contrary to the NTC’s statements followed by ICC’s affirmations that Saif al-Islam could be tried there “according to the International standards”.

The recent protests against the self appointed NTC government underline the existing distrust and frustration. FP reports:

“The NTC has been doing little to help itself. Formed in the eastern city of Benghazi in the heat of battle, it has morphed into an organization both secretive and inefficient. It refuses to make public its membership list, or its meetings, or its voting records. Nor will it open the books on what is being done with the country's swelling oil revenues. On top of everything else, earlier this month it bungled the drafting of legislation for a planned June national election, thus feeding the paranoia of Libyans who believe that many of its members are Gaddafi loyalists trying to manipulate the revolution to their own ends.
It has no press office. Or rather, it does, but as one of its former press officers recently explained to an online journalism forum, a decision was taken that the NTC would have no press officers, so the office is unmanned and the door locked. There is no phone”.

It seems that two towns have turned into some kind of statelets forming an alliance though there is still considerable sympathy for the idea of a unitary Libyan state -- especially among the revolutionaries who hail from the relatively sophisticated towns of the coast:

“Both Zintan and Misrata have transformed themselves into virtual statelets, with heavy security forces that control all movements in and out. Misrata's "gate" boasts thirty white poles flying the flags of the world, giving you the feeling of entering another country”.

But beyond the fragmentation and the numerous (over 300) militias, Libya is awash with arms. The Gulf Today reports: “Out of a population of 6.4 million, about 125,000 people are believed to be armed.

Many are part of the numerous paramilitary groups that remain independent from the transitional government, according to a report recently by the International Crisis Group”.

Recently the UN warned that it is possible that arms reach to the hands of Africa's Sahel region like Boko Haram and al Qaeda. Nevertheless, the presence of arms for some is beneficial.

These are the smugglers (in cooperation with fighters) earning money by trading arms illegally. According to the Asharq Alawsat report: “There are two kinds of dealers who come to buy the new weapons. The first are the dealers who come from [the Egyptian region of] Upper Egypt, who look for small arms, which are sold in the small towns of Upper Egypt. The second are dealers who come from [the Egyptian region of ] Al-Arish, who look for heavy weapons, such as Sam-7 missiles, RPG rockets, hand-grenades, land mines, and night visual equipment”.

The roads of smuggling are those that were used for “smuggling tones of drugs between the Algerian-Libyan border and the Libyan-Egyptian border”. Those activities are well combined with human trafficking as Libya serves as a transit route for human trafficking, mostly of Somali and Ethiopian nationals, to Italy and other European countries. While Gaddafi had asked five billions euros from the EU to stem the flow of the illegals the new government has adopted a different approach as the Interior Minister Fawzi Abdelali stated that Libya will not be the ‘border guard’ for Europe.

Given this chaotic situation – which we had predicted since May – the option of a new military operation in Bani Walid could be catastrophic. Libya has to get used at political solutions to the numerous confrontations.