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| Mali conflict spurs turmoil in Libya | |||||
| 2013-01-28 | |||||
Fears are growing that post-Muammar Gaddafi Libya is becoming an incubator of turmoil, with an overflow of weapons and militants operating freely, ready for battlefields at home or abroad. The possibility of a Mali backlash was underlined the past week when several European governments evacuated their citizens from Libya's second largest city, Benghazi, fearing attacks in retaliation for the French-led military assault against Al Qaeda-linked extremists in northern Mali.
Already, Libya's turmoil echoes around the region and in the Middle East. The large numbers of weapons brought into Libya or seized from government caches during the 2011 civil war against Gaddafi are now smuggled freely to Mali, Egypt and its Sinai Peninsula, the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip and to rebels fighting Syrian President Bashar Assad. Militants in Libya are believed to have operational links with fellow militant groups in the same swath, Libyan fighters have joined rebels in Syria and are believed to operate in other countries as well. Libyan officials, activists and experts are increasingly raising alarm over how militants have taken advantage of the oil-rich country's weakness to grow in strength. During his more than four-decade rule Gaddafi stripped the country of national institutions, and after his fall the central government has little authority beyond the capital, Tripoli. Militias established to fight Gaddafi remain dominant, and tribes and regions are sharply divided.
Earlier this month, former Libyan leader Mustafa Abdul Jalil warned the militant threat extends to efforts to establish a state that can enforce rule of law. "Libya will not see stability except by facing them," he told a gathering aired on Libyan TV. "It is time to either hold dialogue or confront them." He listed 30 officials and police officers assassinated in Benghazi the past year. The Mali drama illustrates how the threat bounces back and forth across the borders drawn in the Sahel, the region stretching across the Sahara Desert. Libya and Mali are separated by Algeria, but the two countries had deep ties under Gaddafi. Thousands of Tuaregs moved from Mali to Libya beginning in the 1970s, and many joined special divisions of Gaddafi's military where they earned higher salaries than they would have at home. As Gaddafi was falling in 2011, thousands of heavily armed Tuareg fighters in southern Libya fled to northern Mali. The Tuareg are an indigenous ethnic group living throughout the Sahel, from Mali to Chad and into Libya and Algeria. The fighters, led by commander Mohammed Ag Najem, broke the Mali government's hold over the north and declared their long-held dream of a Tuareg homeland, Azawad. But they in turn were defeated by militants, some linked to Al Qaeda's branch in North Africa, who took over the territory and imposed rule under an extreme version of Shariah.
In retaliation, militants seized an oil complex in eastern Algeria, prompting a siege by Algerian forces that killed dozens of Western hostages and militants. The militant group that carried out the Algeria hostage taking, in turn, had help from Libyan extremists in the form of smuggled weapons and "organiational ties," the group's leader, Moktar Belmoktar said. "Their ideological and organisational connection to us is not an accusation against a Muslim but a source of pride and honour to us and to them," Belmoktar, the one-eyed Algerian founder of the Masked Brigade, said of the Libyans in an interview. | |||||
| Posted by:Steve White |
| #1 I suspect 'tribes' are the natural organization of humans, that all our political structure is transient. |
| Posted by: Glenmore 2013-01-28 07:43 |