Russia and Turkey’s jostling in Libya adds to North African unrest

Russian mercenaries of the Wagner corporation are digging their heels in, and moving a lot of earth and sand in the process, ahead of the UN’s deadline for foreign forces to get out of Libya by the weekend. The deadline is part of a peace process tailored by the acting UN Special Representative Stephanie Williams which started with a ceasefire last 23 October.

The next stages are the removal of foreign forces, and the formation of a new executive council now being formed by the all-party Libyan Dialogue Forum – LPDF – just given the seal approve by the UK, France, Italy, Germany and the US. The new body will guide Libya to national elections on 24 December, and the election of a new president.

Stephanie Williams, who steps down next month, reckons there are at least 20,000 foreign forces supporting the two main opponents in Libya’s on-off civil war. Williams’ diplomacy  has resulted in a very tight deadline for the new Biden administration, as has the deterioration of political and civil order in Tunisia next door, where the nose dive of the economy aggravated by the Covid pandemic has brought rioters out on the streets of the main cities each night for the past week.

In addition there are the demands of the ever-fluid security picture in Syria. Remaining American troops are currently reinforcing the strategic town of Deir ez Zor, in a drive to keep resurgent Islamic State forces east of the Euphrates river.

The new administration will have to address the mixed bag of policies and postures left by Trump as his Middle East legacy. It has to be a variable speed agenda – from America trying to pick up the pieces after Trump quit the Iran nuclear deal, the JCPOA, which has to be done in weeks if is to have any chance at all of generating new momentum – to re-starting the Palestinian-Israeli peace process, which will be a much slower burn.

The Russian Wagner company has about 2,000 mercenary operatives in Libya. They back the commander of the Libyan National Army, Khalifa Haftar, who tried to take the capital Tripoli last year with a coup de main that went spectacularly wrong in the summer. His forces, backed by a mixed bag of allies, including Wagner operatives and UAE and Egyptian kit and trainers, were thwarted by mercenaries supported by Turkey with a range of surprisingly capable weaponry including drones, anti-aircraft missiles, jammers and portable radars.

Turkey says it is acting in support of the Government of National Accord of Fayez al-Sarraj, which was initially approved by the UN. Under an openly signed and published agreement Turkey continues the supply of equipment including Hawk air defence missiles and 3D Kalakan radars. The Turkish trainers and commanders seem as reluctant to pull out the Russians.

Just this month the Russians have been spotted by surveillance satellite digging a 70-kilometer fortified ditch from their base at Sirte on the coast to al-Jufra, their base in the desert. The ditch, which looks like a piece of heavy fortification from Roman times, is guarded by 30 strong points along the way.

“The real victims in all this are the Libyan people,” says one of Europe’s most senior envoys in the region, and one of the most seasoned observers of the Mediterranean geopolitical scene. “They have been suffering for ten years now, since the overthrow of Gadhafi. I don’t think things are going to get better very quickly.”

His fear, one shared by Stephanie Williams, is that Fayez al-Sarraj will try to take over the interim council and then refuse to hold elections either for the new parliament or presidency. He has recently signed a treaty with two of the strongest militia groups in the Tripoli area.

“The Americans have left a vacuum, and this should give an opportunity for Europe, if only Europe can take it,” the envoy told me. The EU alliance is far from united. The Italians are especially suspicious of Emmanuel Macron’s support hitherto, and not well concealed at all for the warlord of Benghazi Khalifa Haftar. “I don’t think Haftar poses much of a problem,” the envoy said, “after all, he is a military man who has been defeated in the field. That doesn’t look good, and he’s now back in his corner.”

The Italians have built a super-mission, partly in Rome and partly in Tripoli, to support EU policy in the region and to provide a shadow to the UN Mission to Libya, UNSMIL, about to be headed by a Jan Kubis, a former Slovak foreign minister and recent UN representative to Lebanon. Part of the unwritten remit for the Italian super-mission is to monitor the French in their private spat with the Turks.

The dire and continuing humanitarian crisis was underlined this week with news of the loss of 43 migrants from West Africa on an overcrowded dinghy setting out from Libya. “Last year was bad for migrants,” stated a UN rapporteur, “and this year looks set to be as bad, or worse.”

It has been an ugly anniversary, too, for Tunisia, where ten years ago the autocratic rule of President Zine al-Alsidine Ben Ali was ended by the first insurgency of what came to be called the Arab Spring. This was supposed to have delivered a brand new democracy for the Arab world. But today, despite the best democratic intentions of President Kais Saed, a fifth of the 11 million population are below the poverty line.

Covid and the collapse of tourism, partly compounded by the Islamist threat, have taken their toll. Roughly 100,000 students drop out each year now, and of those about 12,000 take the desperate measure of trying to get to Europe by raft.

“The problem is that we in the West projected our Western values too much on what was going on with the so-called Arab Spring,” said the envoy this week, who has served his country and multinational organisations across the Maghreb. “We put on these peoples our view of the world, and our hopes, rather than attending to their real needs.”

He believes that Joe Biden and his team now face a particularly difficult legacy left by Donald Trump across the entire region. “I don’t think that he will reverse Trump policies altogether. There is no chance that he can take American policy back to pre-Trump.”

Syria will be especially tricky. James Jeffrey, Trump’s ambassador to Syria, believes that Biden will allow the crisis in Syria to become another ‘frozen conflict,’ with divisions allowed to stay as they are currently, with no rapprochement towards Damascus and much greater wariness towards Turkey across the piece – in contrast to what amounted to Trump’s infatuation with Erdogan’s policies and autocratic ways.

Biden himself will not countenance Turkey’s attacks on the Kurds, claiming all and sundry are scions of the old Marxist PKK nationalist movement. It means that the Kurdish enclave of Rojava in North East Syria will survive – despite Erdogan’s attempts to destroy it by overt and covert means.

Biden’s focus, though, will be on Iran with positive engagement expected on the nuclear deal. There is also a need to reduce the influence of the pro-Iranian Hezbollah movements in Syria and Iraq.

One of the big unknowns is what Russia will do. James Jeffery thinks Russia is no mood for expansion. He thinks Russia will try to hang on to the influence and positions it currently has in Syria and Libya – though Moscow gains little from them. It is just possible, he has suggested in a recent interview, that Russia may try to pull its forces back from both conflicts under a diplomatic smokescreen.

“The Russians have had a big unexpected surprise in Nagorno–Karabakh,” said the European envoy. “The Turks are now a real problem. What are they up to? They say it’s all part of  historic mission. This is why they appear to be attacking the Armenians, a historic enemy, yet again.

“They claim to have made new gas reserves in their areas of the Eastern Mediterranean – but there is absolutely no evidence from the oil and gas companies that they have found anything at all.

“For the Europeans and the Russians, the Turks seem to be playing a very dirty, underhand, game.”