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It appears that this series of failed deals ended on August 21, 2020, when that day Fayez al-Sarraj, head of the Presidential Council and the Skhirat Accord government in western Tripoli, and Aqila, issued two simultaneous high announcements. the fire. Saleh, the president of the House of Representatives elected in 2014 and based in the east. What happened that day was followed by talks in Bouznika in Morocco (September 11) between the delegations of the House of Representatives and the Council of State emanating from the Skhirat Agreement, which were followed by the announcement of a permanent ceasefire agreement. throughout Libya (October 23), followed by the Libyan Dialogue Forum, which included a broad framework of political and social forces under the auspices of the United Nations in Tunis (November 9). On February 5 in Geneva, 74 members of the Libyan Dialogue Forum elected the executive authority, represented by three members of a presidential council representing the three regions of Libya, Tripoli, Cyrenaica and Fezzan, as president of this council, then head of government, provided that this executive authority takes Libya into a transition phase that ends in the elections of December 24, 2021 after the drafting of a constitution. All the parties to the conflict in Libya internally (Al-Sarraj – Khalifa Haftar) and externally (Egypt – Saudi Arabia – United Arab Emirates – France on the one hand, and on the other hand the United States – Italy – Algeria) welcomed what happened. in Geneva on February 5.
What happened since August 21, 2020 suggests that there are factors pushing towards the Libyan settlement, its engines have started to turn, while those factors were not present before that date.
What happened?
The explosive internal Libyan conflict since the summer of 2014 has been nurtured by external support parties (Egypt, Emirates, Saudi Arabia and France by the eastern Libyan forces led by Khalifa Haftar) and on the other hand Algeria, Turkey and Italy by the forces. West Libya, with the neutrality of the United States. Later, Russia entered Haftar’s line of support through unofficial ways, one of which is Wagner’s forces. The Libyan conflict was not a cause for concern for the international and regional atmosphere, rather it was beneficial for him, since it is a field to settle accounts or stabilize existing balances, and for some countries (such as the UAE) it is useful in terms of prevent the emergence of an alternative hub for Dubai, close to Europe, which includes oil, gas and a bank AND a missing element in the Gulf, which is the knowledge economy (located in the head and not in the arm) for the for the citizen and not for the expatriate, it could give new economic capital to the Middle East region.
A new element entered the Libyan crisis on November 28, 2019, when the Turkish-Libyan maritime border agreement was signed, which considers that the border extends between them through the sea passage that separates the islands of Cyprus and Crete. He lit red lights in Athens, Nicosia, Paris and Cairo. This agreement between Erdogan and Al-Sarraj was accompanied by a military-security cooperation agreement, according to which the scope of the Turkish military presence in western Libya became clear. Since that day, maritime tensions between Greece and Turkey, which had been dormant since the 1970s of the Cyprus crisis, have returned, and France entered the military tension line via warships with Ankara, while Egyptian President Al-Sisi was not thinking only about the arrival of the Turks to the western realm of Egyptian national security, but mainly to the Muslim Brotherhood. Erdogan, who if he took control of Libya, would think of overthrowing and ending Sisi’s coup against the Brotherhood in 2013, through the Libyan window to Cairo. In conjunction with this tension, it increased Russian intervention, taking advantage of these cracks, and closing in on Washington’s allies, namely Egypt, Emirates, Saudi Arabia, France, Greece and Cyprus, who were in a state of discontent and muffled anger with Americans. who did not show a negative attitude about what happened between Erdogan and Sarraj and did not feel upset by the Turkish military presence in Libya. At the same time, Algerian President Abdel Majid Tebboune said that western Tripoli is a “red line” on January 5, 2020, when Haftar’s forces were at the gates of the Libyan capital, in an expression of the Algerian concern that Haftar, backed by the Egyptians would take control of all of Libya.
During the months of May and June 2020, the military scene changed when western Libyan forces were able to expel Haftar’s forces from the capital and the entire western Libyan region to the city of Sirte, which is the gateway. to the Libyan center from the west, as well as Ajdabiya, the eastern gate of the center. On June 20, Sisi announced that the “Sirte line is a red line”, which crosses it, which would lead to the entry of Egyptian forces into Libya. There was the specter of a Turkish-Egyptian war in Libya, with all its entanglements, interventions and subscriptions, along with the Greco-French naval tensions with the Turks.
The fighting stopped and no one crossed the Sirte line, although this could have happened with the withdrawal and collapse of Haftar’s forces in the west and center. Notably, the US ambassador to Libya (living in western Tripoli) Richard Norland said on June 22 when he called on “foreign parties to stop fueling the conflict, warning that violence increases the division of the country in the interests of the foreign parties “. Norland was probably thinking during his statement in Moscow, at which time Wagner’s forces had been present at the Al-Youfra base south of Sirte, and not in Ankara, and he thought that the spread of the Russians south of the Mediterranean near the southern borders of NATO there is an American red line, while this is the red line.The American was not present with Obama in 2015 when the Russian army entered Syria.
Norland’s statement could be the key to what happened from Sarraj and Aqila Saleh on August 21, and not from Haftar, when the ceasefire was announced. It seems that Washington has decided to turn off the engines of the Libyan conflict when it felt that this conflict would be an outlet from Moscow to North Africa for a military presence, similar to what happened in the 1970s in Angola and Ethiopia when the Kremlin and the Cubans. they were present in the heart of the brown continent through local conflicts that acquired a regional-international dimension. The second factor behind turning off the engines are the wars between NATO members for Libya (Turkey against Greece and France) and a regional war with a dangerous influence between Cairo and Ankara on Libyan soil, to which Algeria cannot be outside.
Here, Libya can be an example to study the solution factors in a burning crisis, whose internal parties have many external extensions. In the crises in Namibia and Angola, the factor of settlement in them, respectively in 1988 and 1991, was related to the defeat of the Kremlin in front of the White House in the Cold War and the tendency of Washington to abandon, in the absence of interest. for employment, the apartheid regime in South Africa, which had been in control since 1915. Namibia supports the Angolan UNITA movement against the pro-Soviet mass movement backed by Cuban forces. The Syrian crisis is now similar to that of Libya (2014-28 November 2019). The Yemeni crisis can already be resolved with the US-Iranian rapprochement in the Biden era, if it is included as a complementary or paving factor in the issue of the nuclear deal between Washington and Tehran. Biden’s disagreements with Riyadh on the Houthi issue suggest that things are heading down a new Yemeni path different from the one it has been on since March 26, 2015.
* A Syrian writer
