UN’s “Four Steps” to Stop the War in Libya

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TSCFWA -- Seven months after the military offensive began to gain control of Tripoli, launched on April 4 2019 by General Khalifa Haftar, the situation in Libya is desperate. The World Health Organization has stopped keeping track of fatalities, which are at more than a thousand (including dozens of civilians) according to the latest update available in mid-July. The Government of National Accord (GNA) of Prime Minister Fayez al Sarraj is cut off, without an airport and with closed land borders, but it does not want to surrender to the Libyan National Army (LNA), which has neither the strength nor the capacity to conquer a vast urban area like that of Tripoli, not to mention Misrata, home to the country’s most aggressive militias and also known as the ‘Libyan Sparta’. The military stalemate has generated a situation of permanent chaos just a few kilometres from the European coast. We now risk the Libyan outpost of the former Islamic State, now bereft of its leader Abu Bakri al Baghdadi, coming back to life in the shadow of a Syrian-style proxy war, on a small scale and with low intensity, fought with a few thousand men on the ground, but a large amount of foreign aid.

Meanwhile, the Libyan economy, instead of flourishing thanks to oil, risks collapse. The region of Cyrenaica uses money printed in Russia, generating huge debt that will weigh on future generations of Libyans for decades. The Tripolitania government has cut fuel subsidies and introduced a significant tax on money changers to limit smuggling, but the black market continues to prosper. The process to approve the Libyan budget, the result of long negotiations between east, west and the international community, this year promises to be even more complicated – it is difficult to sit at the negotiating table while shots are being fired. The UN envoy to Libya, Ghassan Salamé, has announced a new four-step plan to get out of this hellish situation.

Ceasefire and observers on the ground
The route recommended by the Lebanese UN diplomat goes almost entirely via Berlin, where an international conference should be held on Libya (but without the Libyans) at a date yet to be defined. Those in the know talk of the end of the year, but the most cautious reports indicate the spring of 2020. The format of the meeting will be ‘P5 + 5’, that is the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (China, France, United Kingdom, Russia and United States) plus the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Turkey (the three non-western countries most heavily involved in the conflict) as well as Italy and Germany (the latter currently a non-permanent member of the Security Council). The absence of Tunisia and Algeria, two neighbouring North African countries very much interested in the stability of Libya, is notable, as is that of the three countries of the Sahel belt, south of the Sahara, namely Niger, Chad and Sudan. The proposal of Mr Salamé is as simple as it is direct: those who count are at the table, that is, those who have the power of veto within the Security Council, and those present on the ground in the Libyan conflict. The first step indicated by the UN is a resolution of the Security Council to impose a ceasefire. The premise is clear: before we can start any negotiations, the war must stop. Easier said than done, since the Security Council continues to be divided; after all, if it were not, it would have already stopped General Haftar’s offensive some time ago.

The second stage of the road delineated by the United Nations, as reported in Italy by Agenzia Nova, foresees a mission of international observers in Libya to monitor the ceasefire. Here too the Security Council is involved, in having to form another resolution even more tricky than the first. How and when will “neutral” observers be chosen? Who will guarantee their protection? How long will it last and what limits will the mission’s mandate have? Is there really at this point a country willing to risk the lives of its soldiers within a state under full civil war, where the only Western embassy on the ground is that of Italy (which rightly has its own interest in staying)? The third step proposed by Salamé consists of bringing closer together the positions of the parties involved in the conflict, namely the Government of National Accord on one hand and the Libyan National Army on the other, obviously without forgetting the southern Arab, Berber and Tebu tribes. However, to do that you have to get to the heart of the conflict: distribution of oil revenues, control of the Central Bank and, above all, control of the Libyan Investment Authority, the sovereign wealth fund with an estimated value of about $70bn still “frozen” by the United Nations.

Federalism or partition?
For some time, international diplomats have worked under the radar on a new “federal” Libya, where the three historical regions (Tripolitania, Fezzan and Cyrenaica) can enjoy greater autonomy than the current structure centred on Tripoli. Notably, the Istituto per gli Studi di Politica Internazionale (ISPI), an Italian think tank, has published an interesting article in which it proposes an alternative solution of a “Kurdish type” be applied to Libya. In a nutshell, Cyrenaica would receive about 30 per cent of the proceeds of oil resources, in exchange for peace. This proposal has the advantage of going to straight to the crux of the matter: the unclear distribution of oil revenues – extracted by the National Oil Corporation, but distributed by the Libyan Central Bank of Tripoli – is one of the main causes that have led de facto to the tragic situation of civil war. However, several obstacles are still to be overcome, some of them of a practical nature. How many Libyans are there, and where are they? It is important to know this accurately if the proceeds of oil and gas are to be distributed based on population (or rather, to the autonomous governments theoretically elected by voters or by the tribes at local level). The last population census dates back to 2006: new impartial statistical surveys should be carried out, the results of which to be universally recognised.

This is where the fourth and final “step” outlined by the United Nations envoy comes into play – the creation of trust, a feeling that at present, according to Salamé, is absent in Libya. The Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General stated that the building of trust starts with simple gestures, such as the exchange of the bodies of combatants killed in battle from both sides. The displaced population (over 120,000 in Tripoli alone) should be able to return to their homes, civil infrastructures should be reopened, as well as schools and universities. All these seemingly normal things currently seem almost utopian in some parts of the country. The problem is that Libya is already divided: Cyrenaica is the preserve of Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, France and Russia; Tripolitania is supported by Qatar, Turkey and Italy; Fezzan, with its oil fields, remains a territory vulnerable to raids by armed groups and traffickers. Until these powers agree on the future of what remains of Gaddafi’s ‘Jamahiriya’, every UN plan is doomed to failure.

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Freedom From Domineering Power

A Glimpse Of Freedom

By John Pilger

May 25, 2006

The long, wide, bleak streets of cobblestones and tufts of petrified grass reach for the sacred mountain Illimani, whose pyramid of snow is like a watchtower. There was almost no life here when I first came to Bolivia as a young reporter – only the freezing airport and its inviting oxygen tent; now almost a million people live in El Alto, the highest city in the world, the creation of modern capitalism.

El Alto is as symbolic of Latin America today as Cerro Rico is of the past. A hill almost solid with silver, Cerro Rico was mined by slave labour and served to bankroll the Spanish empire for three centuries. Both places are in the poorest country on a continent of 225 million inhabitants, half of whom are poor. Debt bondage, even slavery, still exists secretly in Bolivia, whose hill of silver now takes second place to other natural treasures of gas and water. I arrived in El Alto in the early hours of the morning. Through skeins of fog, the moonlit streets were deserted save for silhouettes of hunched men swaying in the cold, framed in doorways, waiting, hoping, for the morning’s first auctioned work.

Bolivia was second only to Chile as a laboratory of “neoliberalism”, the jargon for capitalism in its pure, Hobbesian form. The Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs designed the “shock therapy” that the IMF and World Bank administered in Bolivia, adding another dimension of poverty and suffering. With the privatisation of the mines, tin finally collapsed, and the miners and their families headed for La Paz, settling on the bitter plain at El Alto, a thousand feet above the capital, without water and power and with little food. Farmers forced off their land by IMF diktats followed them, and their mass migration was typical of that of millions driven out of secure work by the foreign managers of the “Washington consensus”, a fanaticism conceived at Bretton Woods in 1944 as a tool of empire. (Sachs sees himself as a liberal and is mentor to the gormless Bono, of Live Aid et cetera fame.)

Until now, Bolivia’s modern presidents have all been rich, white men who ran the country on behalf of a tiny wealthy minority. Owners of vast tracts of land control the lowlands around Santa Cruz, reminiscent of their equivalent in South Africa. The pre-Inca indigenous majority were the “blacks” who were politically invisible, except as occasionally troublesome workers, especially the miners. People chewed coca leaves to relieve hunger; many died in their early middle years and their children were stunted. “My mother was worked to death on a big estate near Santa Cruz,” a campesino told me. “If she was found learning to read, she was severely punished.”

The last president but one, Sánchez de Lozada, a multimillionaire mine-owner now exiled in Maryland, had grown up in the United States and spoke better English than Spanish. He was known as “El Gringo”. In colluding with the IMF and selling off the country’s gas and water at knock-down prices to Brazilian, American and European multinationals, he fulfilled his role, like so many Latin American presidents, as Washington’s viceroy. Indeed, Richard Nixon’s contemptuous remark about Latin America – “People don’t give a shit about the place” – was quite wrong; America’s imperial design was inscribed on the lives of the people in its “backyard”.

Last year, I interviewed Pablo Solón, son of the great Bolivian muralist Walter Solón, in an extraordinary room covered by his father’s epic brush strokes. More visceral than Diego Rivera’s images of the Mexican revolution, the pictures of injustice rage at you; the barbaric manipulation of people’s lives shall not pass, they say. Pablo Solón, now an adviser to the government of Evo Morales, said: “The story of Bolivia is not unlike so many resource-rich countries where the majority are very poor. It is the story of the government behind the government and what the American embassy allows, for in that building is the true source of power in this country. The US doesn’t have major investments here; what they fear is another Chávez; they don’t want the ‘bad example’ to spread to Ecuador and beyond – even to Nigeria, which might be inspired to tax the oil companies as never before. For the US, any genuine solution to poverty spells trouble.”

“How much would it cost to solve the poverty of Bolivia?” I asked.

“A billion dollars; it’s nothing. It’s the example that matters, because that’s the threat.”

I drove out of El Alto with Juan Delfín, an indigenous church deacon, taxi driver and artist, who spoke about the conquistadores if they were within his memory. This is a society where a half-millennium of history is a presence and its subjugation and impoverishment are understood with anger. With Illimani looming ahead of us, a cemetery consumed the horizon. On the other side of the road was a small hill not of silver, but rubbish: a stinking, smoking, acrid hell of dust and dead dogs and wild pigs and women in traditional bowler hats digging with pickaxes for something, anything. “Here you have the symbol of everything we live and reject,” said Delfín.

He took me to a plaque with the names of 24 people shot to death by the army in October 2003 when de Lozada tried to stop the people of El Alto marching down to La Paz in protest against his selling-off of gas. Juan Delfín linked their deaths to the lines of ordinary graves, many of them children, “who also died violently, from poverty”. A shepherd boy emerged from a pile of stones where he lived, looking too small for his age.

After de Lozada was driven from Bolivia, his successor Carlos Mesa capitulated to the demands of the social movements, such as El Alto’s Federation of Neighbourhood Committees. These are a new phenomenon of Latin America; the Landless People’s Movement in Brazil is the best known, but the most effective, politically, have been in Bolivia. For more than five years, the movements included almost the entire population of the city of Cochabamba as they fought the “water wars” against a foreign consortium led by a subsidiary of the American multinational Bechtel, which de Lozada had handed the city’s public water supply, causing water bills to consume a third of meagre incomes. Even the right to collect rainwater belonged to Bechtel. With an annual revenue of more than $17bn, the company’s power is such that it expected and got (without the inconvenience of bidding) the contract to rebuild the US fortress in occupied Iraq. Yet, not only was Bechtel driven out of Bolivia in 2000, shortly followed by its mentor de Lozada, but the company has now dropped its compensation action against the government. It is a victory of huge significance, because it warns other multinationals in Bolivia (such as British Gas) that even if the government is prepared to compromise the wrath of the people, the movements are not.

It is also a warning to Evo Morales, whose electoral victory in December remains largely symbolic here. An indigenous man now leads Bolivia for the first time; the chequered pre-Inca flags are proudly on high everywhere. “The elections aren’t something we asked for, ever,” said Oscar Olivera, the Cochabamba union leader who led the anti-Bechtel revolt. “What the social movements need to do now is to continue accumulating popular forces, to build up our ability to pressure whatever government that comes. A Morales government would be less difficult to love, but it will still be difficult.”

Unlike his absurd caricature abroad – a previous American ambassador to Bolivia likened Morales to Osama Bin Laden and his party (MAS) to an Andean Taliban – “Evo”, as he known here, is not a “radical”, not yet. His theatrical announcement of “nationalisation” on 1 May did not mean expropriation, and he made it clear the multinationals would not lose any rights. What they will lose is their grotesque share of profits and benefits; they will now have to pay true market prices for Bolivia’s gas, along with a proper rate of tax. His vice-president, Álvaro García Linera, has said “capitalism will last for 50 years in Bolivia”. Before the election he told me: “In a small country like Bolivia, you can’t be heroes.”

But many have been heroes, in the blockade of Cochabamba, in the surge of people from El Alto down into La Paz, facing bullets and expelling their gringo president. Out of the new spirit abroad in Latin America, perhaps the Bolivians and Venezuelans have brought true revolutionary change closest. The contrast is with the “left-wing” Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil, who agreed to IMF terms even before he took office and who has distributed less land than his right-wing predecessor.

The likeable Evo is on notice above all with his own people, but also with the Americans, the “government behind the government”. Unless Washington can “lobotomise him” (as it did with Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti), it is likely to encourage a secessionist movement in the landowners’ heartland of Santa Cruz, where the gas is and where the government has promised to redistribute unused land. Bolivia, like Venezuela, has glimpsed its freedom and demands our support.

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Stop Bush & Blair's terror

Stop Bush & Blair's terror

THE RESULT of George Bush spreading his version of 'freedom and democracy' is evident worldwide: three Guantanamo Bay prisoners have hanged themselves, while death and destruction continues in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Bob Severn
Following the three Guantanamo deaths, the US administration callously dismissed the suicides as "a good PR [public relations] move" co-ordinated by the prisoners.

Guantanamo's base commander, Rear Admiral Harry Harris, was equally unconcerned about the deaths. "They have no regard for human life, neither ours nor their own," he said.

The prison camp, where only ten of the 460 prisoners have ever been charged for a crime, has led even Danish prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen - a firm backer of the US/UK invasion and occupation of Iraq - to call for facilities at Guantanamo to be closed down. Of course, he's saying this to limit embarrassing PR!

Bad PR for 21st century imperialism does not stop there though. Leading politicians and officials in Afghanistan, supposed to be an example of US-exported democracy, have been exposed in a 220-page report by the UN high commissioner for human rights.

The UN report (uncovered by the guardian after being shelved for 18 months), accuses the former warlords, now in positions of power, of war crimes including massacres, torture and mass rape.

Last week a British solder was killed, the first since 3,300 UK troops were sent to the Afghan province of Helmand, as battles increase between coalition troops and resurgent Taliban forces. Two more soldiers were seriously injured. Two US soldiers were killed the Tuesday before, with dozens of Taliban and Afghan soldiers killed in the past month.

Meanwhile, Bush and Blair have tried to divert attention away from the mess they have made by trumpeting the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqarwi, al-Qa'ida leader in Iraq. The US President said: "It is a victory for the war on terror".

Unfortunately for Bush, Zarqarwi's death will not quell the insurgency. This is not only because al-Qa'ida have said they will avenge his death but also because the 'insurgency' is not just al-Qa'ida.

Much of the violence in Iraq comes from militias allied to different ethnic groups, Sunni, Shi'ite and Kurdish, not just fighting the occupation but fighting each other for political control.

Guantanamo, Afghanistan and Iraq have not happened because George Bush wants to establish worldwide peace but because the US government and their corporate friends want to control more oil resources, as well as secure the US as economic and military ruler of the world.

The Socialist Party has opposed these imperialist wars of occupation and calls for the immediate withdrawal of troops.

However, to cut across religious and ethnic sectarianism requires the building of socialist forces in these countries and the coming to power of governments made up of and representing working-class and poor people.

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D-8 Figures

D-8, also known as Developing-8, is an arrangement for development cooperation among the following member countries: Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia, Nigeria, Pakistan and Turkey. It also adds a new dimension to enrich the social and economic relations of its partners.

Following the “Conference on Cooperation for Development”, on October 22, 1996, and after a series of preparatory meetings, the establishment of D-8 was announced officially by the Summit of Heads of State/Government in Istanbul, on June 15,1997 (Istanbul Declaration).

The objectives of D-8 are to improve developing countries’ positions in the world economy, diversify and create new opportunities in trade relations, enhance participation in decision-making at the international level, and provide better standards of living.

D-8 is a global arrangement rather than a regional one, as the composition of founding members reflects. Membership will be open to other developing countries subscribing to the goals, objectives, and principles of the group, sharing common bonds.

D-8 is a forum with no adverse impact on bilateral and multilateral commitments of the member countries, emanating from their membership to regional and international organisations.

Principal organs

The principal organs of D-8 are the Summit, the Council, and the Commission.

The Summit, which is the supreme organ of D-8 is composed of the Heads of State/Government of member states. It is convened once every two years.

The Council is composed of the Ministers in charge of Foreign Affairs of member states. It is the political decision making organ of D-8, and acts as a forum for thorough and comprehensive consideration of the issues.

The Commission is the executive organ of D-8. It is composed of senior officials appointed by their respective governments. Each Commissioner is responsible for national coordination in his/her respective country.

An Executive Director is appointed to ensure efficient communication, expedite the flow of information, and supervise the provision of services for the meetings.

Areas of cooperation

At the outset, ten sectors have been identified for cooperation and project development. They are: Trade; Industry; Telecommunications and Information; Finance, Banking and Privatization; Rural Development; Science and Technology; Poverty Alleviation and Human Resources Development; Agriculture; Energy; Environment; and Health.

On the basis of a division of labour for the coordination of D-8 activities, each sector is assigned to a member country.

Although 50-60 projects were originally proposed at the First Summit, in order not to spread resources too thinly, the following six priority projects were selected to be launched immediately:

Establishment of an International Marketing and Trading Company
Workshop on Poverty Alleviation
Establishment of an Industrial and Technological Data Bank Network among D-8
Establishment of Takaful Schemes (Insurance), including joint ventures between the companies of D-8
Cooperation for the Development of Inland and Coastal Aquaculture
Design, Development, Production, and Marketing of Agricultural Aircraft
D-8 countries have large, young populations with a growing and increasingly skilled labour force

D-8 member countries have relatively large populations. The total population of D-8 countries was around 800 million in 1997. This corresponds to some 13.5 percent of the world population. In four of the eight countries the population is well over one hundred million, in one country it is more than two hundred million.

After relatively high annual growth rates recorded in previous decades, population growth is gradually coming down in all D-8 countries, similar to the phenomenon observed in the rest of the world. Due to rapid growth in the past, a large part of their population will continue to be young for the foreseeable future, constituting a factor of dynamism in D-8 societies.

Moreover, an increasing number of these young people are being educated and trained in universities and research institutions in order to meet the requirements of high-tech industries for skilled labour.

http://www.mfa.gov.tr/d-8/facts.figures01.htm

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