The Other Lesson: Libya’s Foreign Supported Revolution

Col. Gaddafi believed his people love him. The storming of Bab-al-Aziziya, however, proves to the contrary. Certainly, not everybody is his enemy. Brother Leader is adored by many of the African heads of states who, a few months ago, were witnessed shuttling to his capital with the clear intention of saving his neck. The Big Men of Africa chose the unenviable task of arranging a cease-fire for the mad dictator, completely indifferent to the suffering of the Libyan masses. Nonetheless, the momentum of the revolt was far in progress for their incoherent message to work. His regime went kaput. What followed their prior diplomatic blunders was even worse. The least they could have done was to endorse the decision of the Arab League, another dysfunctional entity, but refused to see the writing on the wall. The African Union has yet to recognize the National Transitional Government. The Frizz Head as the Tripoli residents mockingly call Gaddafi now is all on his own. With no known address.

Despite his bravado on the TV, and lately only with the help of audio message, he may likely be cowering in a fox hole not very different from where the late Saddam Hussein was nabbed in Iraq. He has been persistently calling his subjects as rats, and the likelihood of him and his family being captured in the dark tunnels made for a last stand is getting very close. A few of his family successfully made it to Algeria, and were oddly granted a “desert hospitality” by Algeria, a nation that once prided itself for its revolutionary history.

The obsession of him and his family with secretly built underground tunnels as remarked by the National Public Radio reporter reminds one of the last days of Rumania’s Ceausescu. Not all of the tunnels were made, however, for security or defense purposes. Their other utility was to keep tens of thousands of political dissenters, suspect some Libyans these days. His penal regime has some similarities with the container-jails used by Isaias. The latter has also some underground jails of his own, as poorly constructed as the famous schools and hospitals in the Sahel war times. Things have fallen apart, and the false grandeur of the tyrant in Libya has now become a good material for comedians. Including the famous tent used to impress foreign guests about his alleged close roots with the simple life of the nomadic past is no more. The Tripoli armed mob has burned it to the ground.

Under a false pretense of championing the African cause, Gaddafi lavished million of dollars on notorious tyrants such as Idi Amin of Uganda, the Chad warlords in the late 80s and countless other places in the continent. One of his clients was until recently our own dictator Isaias Afwerki, whose regime had for years made a habit of soliciting from him petrol and undisclosed amount of grants and investments. It is possible that he kissed his hand (after all, Berlusconi, the prime minister, of Italy has done it.) Gaddafi was not his mentor, however. The path to tyranny that manifested itself in Libya following a military coup in 1969 and the rebellion in Eritrea that produced the misanthrope, Isaias, followed different trajectories.

In Libya it was young military officers who, influenced by Gamal Abdel Nasser, launched a top down social engineering. In short, the Libyan type had its roots in military barracks. Their Eritrean counterparts were, however, mostly college students who abandoned their studies to wage a war in the sparsely populated areas of Eritrea. Thanks to the protracted nature of the war and the resource-deficit environment of the theater of war, the largely student elite from the urban areas finally ended up as a military class. The breed in Eritrea was not the ordinary type of military juntas for only this reason: its totalitarian ideology.

It had not started from a scratch, as its bunch of admirers put it in the early post independence period of the nation. Though governing a very poor nation, they were compensated by their complete hold of almost all the available resources of the country including the lives of the people. Tyrant as he was, Gaddafi had not achieved the total mobilization of the whole nation of Libya. Benghazi, Misrata and Tripoli were crowded with the youth of the country before the advent of the recent revolution. Nor was the standing army under the Colonel close to the one in Eritrea, which can easily field a permanent force of several hundred thousands of soldiers.

In comparison with the mobilization policy in Eritrea, which invariably fielded thousands of infantry soldiers in its various conflicts with its neighbors, the army size of both Gaddafi and the opposition of Libya was very minuscule. The ratio of transport trucks to combatants has been high in the battlefronts of Libya. Factor in the population of the same country, which is one or more million bigger than Eritrea’s estimated 4.5 million, and the picture becomes very clear. The Libyan army had also another disadvantage. Unwilling to trust the public, Gaddafi had a few highly trained brigades under the command of his children with no resemblance to an institution of a standing army. True, the Libyan army had some scud missiles and other modern equipment; this had not prevented, however, some military experts from labeling it as a third-rate army.

This state of affairs, bad as it was, did not stop Gaddafi from rapidly reversing the military situation, by unleashing a vicious assault on the hastily prepared citizen-armies in Benghazi and other cities. What it lacked in military capabilities was compensated by its no-bars-hold practice of whole scale slaughter of innocent civilians. The massacres that occurred in Zuwayah and Misrata were terrible signs for the inhabitants in the main rebel held city of Benghazi. They were almost routed out had it not been for the rapid intervention of the NATO air power. The campaign ostensibly started to save the people of Libya soon evolved into an open support for a regime change. The no-fly-zone together with the sea-blockade resulted in a stalemate situation.

For months, the world watched the on-and-off assaults and rapid reverses of the rebel-army west of Benghazi along the narrow strip of the coastline. Poorly organized and ill-disciplined, the rebel army was no match for the relatively better led and well equipped brigades of the government army. At this slow pace, the likely progress of the war towards Tripoli and the end of the conflict was getting dimmer and thinner. Libya was too big for the Toyota pick-ups with a few fighters on them. More over, the status quo created nervousness among the NATO circles. With the public worrying from the worsening economic situation and the two wars in the two Muslim nations such as Iraq, and Afghanistan, the Libya project seemed untenable. In desperation, the NATO powers devised a clever way of ending the military balance with Operation Mermaid Dawn.

Under the cover of heavy bombing from the air, hundreds of rebels were sneaked in from Benghazi to some districts in Tripoli. Gaddafi’s last stronghold was cracked open for attack from the north, the west, and the south. The attacking units were mostly small military groups of different tribes operating independently of the NTC in Benghazi. How were these disparate groups able to create havoc in Tripoli and fracture the seemingly solid bastion of Tripoli? In order to launch this feat a formidable command and control system was required, and the rebels were without it for most of the duration of the war.

Heroism and love for freedom of the Libyans who were under siege for the last 42 years were not what unhinged the close grip of the dictator. It was the indispensable invasion of the West that at the end broke the back of the government army. This was a “neat” war that did not entail the death of a single NATO soldier during the entire phase of the conflict, and not because there were no people with boots on the ground. Incidentally, media sources have ascertained the deployment of military trainers and liaison officers from some of the European nations. The fact that the politicians in the West did not gloat about it and instead gave most of the credit to the Libyan rebels cannot hide the uncomfortable truth. It was the accurate bombing, intelligence, communications and other assets of the West that saved the day of the rebels and prevented the rapture of the country into different political enclaves.

Throughout their history under the military junta, the Libyan people had their modest share of armed rebellion and peaceful protest. All were to no avail, until the emergence of the Arab Spring in North Africa. Arab Spring or not, however, without the massive input of the NATO countries, which deployed all the arsenal including diplomatic isolation, asset freeze, military liaison officers and trainers, the Gaddafi state may have had some more years to live. The French, not constrained by the limited mandate given to them by the UNSC, went as far as dropping arms for the rebels with the help of helicopters. What other lesson do we learn from “sister” colony of Libya? Nothing but this: wey gobo kun, wey mes gobo tesega’a.

The Eritrean regime whose economy had produced nothing that closely resembles self-sufficiency has also its counterparts in the opposition, who detest any armed uprising indigenous or not. They invoke the threat of civil wars, completely forgetting that the nation has been enmeshed for years in it. They refuse to see all the characteristics of a civil war it embodies. If the Belfast unrest that ended a decade ago can be described as a civil war, the magnitude of the one in Eritrea in both human and other costs has been extremely big. The nation has been at war with itself on a large scale. Yet, some in the opposition are not able to see the pink Elephant. It is time to stop the nationalistic frenzy, and wish our forsaken people the kind of intervention that was made in Libya. In the event this happens, the Eritrean people will also “discover freedom”. What is the likelihood of this materializing?

Probably little. Eritrea does not possess the light and sweet crude oil found in Libya, a resource that has a direct impact on the global economy. It has now gold, whose price is presently fetching an unbelievably high price due to the robust demand from the anxiety ridden people in the western world. It is not all gloom and doom, however. Eritrea’s knight savior can only be the labeling of it as a Terrorism Sponsoring State by the United States, or a stiff sanction on its gold mining and the Diaspora funding sources by the United Nations Security Council, or Isaias’s military adventures with the neighbor in the south.

The public has to understand that as much as food self-sufficiency is not the right path for food security for many nations with arid and semi-arid lands, which includes Eritrea, the notion of liberation by solely domestic actors in the context of a totalitarian state is equally wrong. The mass man in Eritrea does not have the appetite for a violent struggle, as many have noted before. Nor does the minimal space for a peaceful resistance exist in the land. Under such a context, the winning strategy in Eritrea is a version of the Libyan model. The rest is a chimera!

The totalitarian political system that does not discriminate between political dissenters and ordinary people as noted by a writer at Asmarino.com has made Ertirea one of the highest net-exporters of people in the world. Libya, reprehensible as its military regime was, was a net-importer of people. Witness the several hundreds thousands of foreign laborers that made their living in the country until very recently, not excluding some from North Korea. Eritrea is one of the most highly militarized societies in the world with almost 37% of its able-bodied people in the armed forces and in the forced labor camps. Libya, on the other hand, had a small standing army supplemented by a mercenary army from largely sub-Saharan Africa. Though military service is mandatory, it was not an open-ended military servitude as in Eritrea. Moreover, Libya was much a less threat to the nuclear family, than the atmosphere in Eritrea, which is breaking up hundreds of thousands of households.

In other words, life in Libya, for the ordinary person was a purgatory compared to the hellish existence in Eritrea. The youth of Libya have been suffering from the ennui of unemployment, but were certainly better fed, clothed and educated than their counterparts in Eritrea, who often risking their lives cross the border to the Sudan, and trek the vast deserts of the Sahara to Libya. Hundreds of these desperate souls then board the rickety boats plying the Mediterranean Sea, and often drown leaving no traces of their bodies for their families to mourn.

They were not deterred, however. After all, respect for the dead, and a proper burial for their cohorts in active duty or jail in Eritrea was no more respected by the rulers of Eritrea. For these compelling reasons, the winning strategy in Eritrea can only be nothing but a version of the Libyan model.

{jcomments off}