President Donald Trump’s Special Envoy Massad Boulos continues his shuttle diplomacy to Libya, trying to reintegrate the country’s two administrations: Prime Minister Abd al-Hamid Dbeibeh’s government in Tripoli and the Libyan Arab Armed Forces and House of Representatives’ government based in Benghazi.
Winning an agreement should not be difficult in theory. The Benghazi-based government controls 81 percent of country, including the entirety of the East and South, as well as Libya’s oil fields and main export terminal. Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar’s administration, like Libyan society, is religiously conservative but anti-Islamist. He led Operation Dignity in 2012 to eradicate the foreign-backed provocateurs whose radicalism and terror support culminated in the murder of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens. Today, Benghazi is as safe as Alexandria, Egypt, or Tangier, Morocco.
The Benghazi-based government controls 81 percent of country, including the entirety of the East and South, as well as Libya’s oil fields and main export terminal.
The difficulty is political. Both Khalifa Haftar and his son Saddam are prickly nationalists; they do not accept dictation from any foreign power and stand up to American, Russian, and Turkish demands when they believe these infringe on Libyan interests and sovereignty.
Dbeibeh is more mercantile and has promoted his self-interest above Libyan development. Tripoli’s stagnation reflects this. While Benghazi soon will have two international airports with state-of-the-art terminals, Tripoli has yet to rebuild its own airport destroyed in fighting more than a decade ago, despite billions of dollars in oil revenue and foreign assistance. One reason for such discrepancy is the dysfunctional corruption and embezzlement rife in the Dbeibeh administration. Like the Félix Tshisekedi in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Dbeibeh realizes he cannot win an election on his record and so seeks to use the peace process to force his reappointment for five years.
Both Turkey and Qatar, sensing Dbeibeh’s prioritization of himself over the Libyan nation, further co-opt Dbeibeh. Turkish businessmen increasingly flood eastern Libya, but the Haftars’ red lines mean that Turks recognize that they cannot leverage that investment into neo-colonial diktats as they do in Tripoli. The Turks look at Dbeibeh as a “yes man” akin to Somalia’s appointed president, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, who also rules with Turkish protection beyond the expiration of his democratic mandate. Ankara, however, realizes it cannot treat Haftar as a puppet willing to trade sovereignty for personal power.
The second major problem Boulos must address if he wants his shuttle diplomacy to succeed is the presence of Sheikh Sadiq al-Ghariani in Tripoli. The Islamist-dominated but now defunct National Transitional Council appointed Ghariani to be the Grand Mufti of Libya. The position has no constitutional basis and Ghariani has no connection to Libya’s traditional Sanusi order, but he nevertheless uses the authority he falsely claims to promote terrorism, rant against counter-terror efforts, and espouse an Islamic State-like vision for Libya.
Ghariani, for example, has demanded gender segregation in Libya and protested against United Nations-embraced protections for girls and women. While the Libyan Arab Armed Forces takes a zero-tolerance approach to Islamist terrorism, Ghariani has endorsed suicide bombing. He has even endorsed Ansar al-Sharia, the group that murdered Stevens, declaring, “We should not use the word terrorism when referring to Ansar al-Sharia. They kill and have their reasons. Those among them who have died are martyrs.” Against the backdrop of the Hamas conflict, Ghariani has sought to offer Hamas safe haven in Libya and has urged the murder of Egyptian and Jordanian border guards who prevent jihadists from entering Gaza or the West Bank.
If Boulos is going to add Libya to Trump’s list of peace-making deals, he must first demand Libya’s expulsion of Ghariani and the imprisonment of Ansar al-Sharia members.
While Boulos and Libyans seek peace, Ghariani not only rallies against it, but intelligence apparently confirms that while Dbeibeh tells Boulos that he is committed to peace, he coordinates with Ghariani behind the scenes to incite the public against it and create a reason not to fulfill the commitments he makes in peace negotiations.
In August 2014, as authorities appeared ready to crack down on Ghariani’s terror-supporting television station in the United Kingdom, the Mufti temporary fled to Qatar. He has also sought safe haven in Algeria. If Boulos is going to add Libya to Trump’s list of peace-making deals, he must first demand Libya’s expulsion of Ghariani and the imprisonment of Ansar al-Sharia members, as well as the extradition of those involved in the 2012 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi.
Boulos also must demand that Dbeibeh sever all ties with Ghariani, rather than continue their behind-the-scenes coordination. Expecting eastern Libya to make concessions in the face of Tripoli-sponsored terrorism is foolish. Dbeibeh believes he can play Boulos and Trump for fools. Trump should both disabuse him of that notion, demand Dbeibeh step down prior to elections, and offer an ultimatum to Ghariani: either exile in Algeria or Qatar, or a prison cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Lower Manhattan.
