A Libia afunda no caos - Ishaan Tharoor (The Washington Post)

 

By Ishaan Tharoor with Sammy Westfall  Email A new crisis may plunge Libya back into chaos Libyan Ministry of Interior personnel stand guard in front of the Central Bank of Libya in Tripoli on Aug. 27. (Ayman Sahely/Reuters) The news out of Libya that tends to grab international attention often involves stark tragedy and disaster. If it’s not the harrowing civil war that has convulsed the oil-rich North Africa nation for years and split it in two, then it’s the drowning of migrants motoring out from Libya’s poorly patrolled coasts or the epochal flood that killed thousands in the city of Derna a year ago. In recent months, though, the considerable drama gripping the country has been far more shadowy, shaped by backroom deals, black market transfers and illicit smuggling. But it’s equally important and fraught. A rolling crisis over control of Libya’s central bank has paralyzed the economy and sparked new fears of conflict. Oil exports have dropped precipitously in recent weeks, while ordinary Libyans are facing long lines at gas stations, restrictions on their ability to withdraw cash from banks and a collapsing electricity grid. The upheaval is the consequence of a spat that flared in August but was long in the works, experts say. A move by forces close to Prime Minister Abdulhamid Dbeibah, who leads the government in western Libya, centered in the capital Tripoli, saw officials in the Central Bank kidnapped and led the bank’s longtime governor, Sadiq al-Kabir, to flee into self-imposed exile in Turkey. The Central Bank, which is the sole legal repository of Libya’s oil-generated wealth, ceased functioning. Oil exports were quickly shut down. Kabir, in Istanbul, said Thursday that Libya was essentially cut off from the world financial system. “All international banks that we deal with, more than 30 major international institutions, have suspended all transactions,” he told Reuters. “All work has been suspended at the international level. Therefore, there is no access to balances or deposits outside Libya.” At its root, the dispute is about rival power brokers’ designs on oil revenue in a country with Africa’s largest oil reserves. Dbeibah’s faction is at odds with that of Khalifa Hifter, which holds sway in eastern Libya and has cultivated deep ties with foreign powers such as Russia and the United Arab Emirates. In the tail end of the country’s ruinous civil war, Haftar attempted an offensive to capture Tripoli that ultimately failed when Turkey rushed military aid and support to the government in Tripoli. The internationally brokered cease-fire in 2020 that followed has settled into an uneasy peace, with Dbeibah and Haftar fighting their battles through other means — for now. U.N.-led efforts to resolve the dispute are underway. But the situation is a reminder of the perilous state of affairs in Libya, which has lurched from crisis to calamity since the bloody revolution and NATO-backed campaign that overthrew Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi in 2011. The country has not experienced stable governance since and is now torn apart by two rival political entities and a patchwork of armed groups. The Dbeibahs and the Haftars have emerged as powerful, quasi-dynastic clans, vying for influence over the key institutions like the Central Bank and the National Oil Corporation, through which most of Libya’s oil revenue flows. Analysts say Dbeibah’s manipulation of the bank for his corrupt ends saw Kabir warm to Haftar, who is simultaneously alleged to also be presiding over vast networks of illicit smuggling. “Kabir had sown the seeds of his own demise,” the Economist explained. “At first he bought off his chief challengers: the people who had risen against dictatorship. After Gaddafi the state payroll almost doubled to 2.4 million in a country of 7 million. It is claimed the bank funded the warlords, paying fighters who both besieged and defended Tripoli.” ADVERTISEMENT   The British newsweekly added: “When the fighting ended in 2020, Kabir financed their ever-more grandiose schemes for hiving off Libya’s vast oil revenue. He paid billions to import fuel at market prices, subsidized it to make it the world’s cheapest, then let it be smuggled overland and increasingly by tanker to Europe. The more lucre and power the recipients amassed, the weaker he grew. When he tried to rein in the purse strings, it was too late.” A general drone view shows the Nafoora oil field in Jakharrah, Libya, on Aug. 27. (Jawhar Deehoum/Reuters) Deeper strains are showing. “The arrangements bridging east and west appear to be nearing a breaking point,” Libya scholar Wolfram Lacher wrote in a lengthy essay for New Lines magazine, pointing to a growing body of evidence regarding the state plunder carried out by both parties, but especially the Haftars. He added: “In the meantime, the Haftars’ greatly improved access to funds threatens to destabilize the balance of power. [Khalifa Hifter’s son] Saddam has told close associates that he is seeking to turn western Libyan factions against each other and buy the support of selected militia leaders — a task made easier by the money he now has at his disposal. His father has informed Western diplomats that he intends to make another attempt to seize Tripoli.” Over the past week, a flurry of top regional officials, including Turkey’s spy chief, have visited the country. The tensions have threatened a rapprochement between Egypt and Turkey, which find themselves at different sides of Libya’s divide. “Egypt and the UAE have backed Haftar in part because of his staunch anti-Islamist ideology that opposes the reliance of the Tripoli government on militias linked to the Muslim Brotherhood movement,” noted the Soufan Center, an independent global security think tank, in a memoearlier this month. “Turkey, by contrast, has engaged regional Muslim Brotherhood-inspired movements and views Haftar as a right-wing figure dedicated to reducing Ankara’s regional influence. Russia, for its part, sees Haftar’s control of most of Libya’s oil fields as a tool in Moscow’s global competition with the United States and its European partners, all of which are backing Ukraine.” The tangled geopolitics belies the frustrations of many Libyans who simply want a degree of political stability. “If you ask any normal Libyan, they’ll say we need one government, we need elections,” a former adviser to the Libyan government, speaking on the condition of anonymity over fears to their safety, told me. But, they added, the country’s power brokers aren’t interested in such an outcome. “Why would Haftar want one government?” the former official said. “He can print money as he pleases, now, and smuggle oil.” ADVERTISEMENT   A lack of Western attention here may be dangerous, especially at a moment when foreign powers could exert some pressure on Libya’s factions to get in line. “Diplomats may be busy stopping other wars in Ukraine and Gaza from growing into monstrous regional conflicts,” wrote Tarek Megerisi of the European Council on Foreign Relations. “But if they’re too consumed to take this brief opportunity, then they may well end up with a third before too long.”

Netanyahu goes to Washington in the shadow of Middle East disaster - Ishaan Tharoor, Anika Arora Seth (The Washington Post)

 The Washington Post, July 21, 2024

By Ishaan Tharoor with Anika Arora Seth The

Netanyahu goes to Washington in the shadow of Middle East disaster The last time Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came to Washington, hopes were high for peace — or, at least, one particular vision of it. It was September 2020, and Netanyahu appeared at a White House then home to Donald Trump. Through a pact brokered by the Trump administration, Israel was normalizing ties with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, two Arab monarchies that shared Israel’s antipathy toward Iran. The diplomatic feat was grandiosely titled the “Abraham Accords” and its promoters cast it as a civilizational breakthrough and the beginning of a new age — no matter that the two Gulf states had never been at war with Israel and already had substantial clandestine dealings with the Jewish state. “This day is a pivot of history,” Netanyahu proclaimed, alongside Trump and top officials from the UAE and Bahrain. “It heralds a new dawn of peace. For thousands of years, the Jewish people have prayed for peace. For decades, the Jewish state has prayed for peace. And this is why, today, we’re filled with such profound gratitude.” The deals generated some lucrative business links between Israel and the monarchies, and were padded by major U.S. arms sales to the Arab kingdoms. But even as more Arab countries warmed to the prospect of normalization with Israel, the new understandings did little to build peace in the context where it was needed most: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That was arguably by design: Netanyahu, a longtime opponent of a separate, sovereign Palestinian state, saw a pathway thanks to Trump to further integrate Israel into its neighborhood while placing the “Palestinian problem” on the back burner. Israel’s burgeoning crop of Arab partners, wary of Iran and frustrated with the dysfunctions within the Palestinian national movement, seemed content to go along with the process. Netanyahu was forced out of power but eventually returned at the helm of the most right-wing coalition in Israeli history. He showed up in September at the dais of the U.N. General Assembly with a map of Israel’s new connections in the region labeled “The New Middle East”; it had no trace of Palestinian claims or Palestine at all. Then Oct. 7 happened, and the world changed. The war that followed militant group Hamas’s deadly strike on southern Israel has convulsed the region. Israel’s ongoing campaign against Hamas pulverized the Gaza Strip, led to tens of thousands of deaths and a sprawling humanitarian catastrophe. International legal action against Israel and its right-wing government have picked up: The International Criminal Court may issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in a matter of days for their role in allegedly starving Gazans; the International Court of Justice, the U.N.’s judicial arm, is hearing a case accusing Israel of carrying out genocide and separately ruled Friday that Israel ought to end its occupation of Palestinian territory and dismantle its settlements. That’s a political nonstarter for Netanyahu, under whose long tenure in power the Israeli settlement project has flourished and expanded across the West Bank. He comes to Washington this week ahead of a controversial speech to Congress, with months of trauma and ruin looming behind him, and a murky political future ahead of him. A clutch of Israel’s Arab neighbors, along with President Biden and his allies, have fitfully tried to negotiate a truce between the warring parties. Talks have yet to yield the cease-fire desired by Palestinians and much of the international community, or the wholesale release of Israeli hostages sought by a grief-stricken Israeli public. In private conversations, some U.S. and Arab officials blame Netanyahu — whose own position may be imperiled in the event of a cessation of hostilities — for deliberately thwarting an agreement. “Netanyahu is under pressure from all quarters. He has a coalition that is unhappy with him and [far-right] partners in Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir threatening to bring it down if he agrees to a ceasefire,” explained Michael Koplow of the Israel Policy Forum. “He has hostage families and the political opposition demonstrating in the streets in increasing numbers in favor of a ceasefire, and a security establishment that is also strongly in favor of a deal to pause the fighting and bring living hostages back home. Biden has been pushing unreservedly for a ceasefire and hostage agreement, and Israel’s regional partners all want the fighting to have come to an end months ago.” The wily Israeli prime minister’s trip to Washington is a gambit to relieve some of this pressure. Netanyahu’s “prime directive is maintaining himself in power, and he’s succeeding,” Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a veteran former U.S. negotiator, told me. He is “coming here to use Congress and the White House as props, in demonstration of his indispensability” to the Israeli public, Miller added, suggesting Netanyahu was “playing for time.” Republicans, eager to twist the knife into Biden and the Democrats, will probably embrace Netanyahu and his defiant position on the war. “What Netanyahu is probably seeking is to make it to the end of the month and the parliamentary summer recess,” wrote Neri Zilber in the Financial Times. “The break stretches until late October, during which it is extremely difficult to topple or replace a sitting government. If Netanyahu makes it this far, the earliest an election could be held would be the first quarter of 2025.” By that point, there may be a new occupant of the White House, and Netanyahu probably expects a second Trump term to boost his own political fortunes — much as the first term did. But the Republican presidential nominee has shown less enthusiasm for Netanyahu in recent months, while the Abraham Accords — cast by Trump as his hallmark foreign policy accomplishment — seem an irrelevance in the current moment. The White House, meanwhile, has faced an insurgency from the left over Israel’s conduct of the war and the United States’ enabling of it. Biden and his advisers have sought to enlist the Gulf kingdoms and some of Israel’s other Arab neighbors in an ambitious “day after” project for Gaza that would see a Palestinian technocratic entity jointly administer that territory and the West Bank, funding from the Gulf for reconstruction pour into Gaza and the Israelis and Palestinians reentering talks over a two-state solution. As the war drags on and Netanyahu remains in office, that vision for peace also seems doomed. The Knesset, the Israeli parliament, voted on Friday to reject the establishment of a Palestinian state — a symbolic move that underscored Netanyahu’s attitude ahead of his trip to the United States. “As long as Netanyahu is there, there’s no chance of any movement toward the ‘day after’ plan,” an Arab official involved in the talks over postwar Gaza told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief the press. There’s no “pivot of history” in sight, in other words. That may be exactly how Netanyahu wants it.

O Império se retrai na África: Rússia e China ocupam os espaços no Niger e em outros países - Ishaan Tharoor, Sammy Westfall (WP)

 

By Ishaan Tharoor with Sammy Westfall  Email

The U.S. is in retreat in a crucial part of the world Protesters demand the withdrawal of U.S. troops in Agadez, Niger, on Sunday. (Issifou Djibo/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock) For boosters of U.S. security interests in Africa, the past few days carried grim tidings. At the end of last week, the United States informed the coup-plotting leadership of Niger that it would comply with its request to withdraw U.S. forces from the country, which had been operating in a counterterrorism role there for more than half a decade. Around the same time, reports emerged that authorities in Chad had sent a letter this month to the U.S. defense attaché based there, ordering the United States to cease activities at a base that also accommodates French troops. The potential withdrawal of a detachment of U.S. Special Forces based in Chad would mark yet another blow for the Western security presence in the Sahel — the vast arid region that stretches below the Sahara desert that has seen a wave of coups in recent years toppling fragile Central and West African governments. Chad is slated to stage elections in May, and the orders to the United States may amount to a bit of nationalist preening by the country’s vulnerable interim leadership. But elsewhere, the writing on the wall is more stark. Successive coup-plotting regimes in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger have ousted weak civilian-led governments; angrily railed against the presence of the former colonial power, France; and turned toward Russia and China for support. Before the coup last year, Niger was seen by Western diplomats as something of a democratic bulwark in a region where juntas and radical Islamist insurgencies were gaining ground. Now its regime has pivoted the impoverished country firmly away from the West, booting out French troops before it moved to end the significant U.S. footprint in the country’s desert uplands. “The agreement will spell the end of a U.S. troop presence that totaled more than 1,000 and throw into question the status of a $110 million U.S. air base that is only six years old,” my colleagues reported. “It is the culmination of a military coup last year that ousted the country’s democratically elected government and installed a junta that declared America’s military presence there ‘illegal.’” The U.S. exit in Niger follows the arrival of a detachment of Russian military trainers in the country this month. Le Monde sketched what had preceded this deployment of some 100 officers of the Africa Corps, the rebranded Russian paramilitary successor to the mercenary Wagner organization, which had a broad, murky presence in Africa before disbanding late last year. “Their official mission was to train Niger’s army, particularly in the use of a Russian-supplied anti-aircraft defense system,” the French newspaper noted. “Three months earlier, Niger’s PM had flown to Tehran to outline plans for closer cooperation with Iran, without providing any details of the nature of the envisioned contracts. This was a clear cause for concern for Western countries, particularly the U.S. The developments are “a blow to Western counterterrorism efforts in the Sahel and Libya,” Ulf Laessing, head of the Sahel program at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, a German think tank, told me. “Perhaps even worse, a U.S. pullout will further open the door for an expansion of Russia and Iran in the Sahel.” A mess of geopolitical intrigue courses through the region. “Like Libya, this part of Africa has become a playground for foreign powers, not least Russia, which provides security for coup regimes and orchestrates massive disinformation campaigns leading to the ousting of Western forces,” an editorial in Le Monde observed. “This is a major trend, of which Americans and Europeans have too belatedly become aware of its cost, without knowing how to respond.” The Wall Street Journal was more blunt in its own editorial: “In the new era of great power competition, Africa is one place where the U.S. is losing.” China, less conspicuous than the opportunistic Kremlin, has steadily shouldered its way into Niger. The country’s junta announced this week that a Chinese state oil company had made an advance $400 million payment for crude purchases from Niger’s Agadem field. The deal, structured with further interest payments to the Chinese company, would help Niger’s cash-strapped government reckon with mounting domestic debts. Some Nigeriens who spoke to my colleagues in the capital of Niamey see the junta exercising a new kind of sovereignty after years of overweening French interest. “Why is it a problem for the Americans and France that the Russians are helping us?” Abdoulaye Oussein, 51, said. “I think we’re free to make our own choices.” New polling from Gallup sees strong approval for Russia and China in many parts of the Sahel. “Last year, China recorded its highest approval rating in Africa in over a decade,” Julie Ray, managing editor for world news at Gallup, told me. “It picked up substantial support in countries in Western Africa — which helped nudge it ahead of the U.S. by two percentage points.” When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, it lost significant support across the continent. But, Ray added, “Moscow’s image has recovered since then,” especially in the Sahel, where it scored high approval ratings in Mali, Burkina Faso and Chad. “Washington was seen in the region as a credible partner without the colonial baggage of France, which is on its way out in the region,” Laessing, who is based in Bamako, Mali’s capital, told me. But U.S. messaging to West African governments may have not been particularly effective, and U.S. officials have been faulted for perhaps bullying their African counterparts in private. “Washington has a lack of self-awareness about how it is coming across,” Cameron Hudson, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told my colleagues this month. “They have made Russia the boogeyman in all of this, like what the French have done, but that is a way to deflect responsibility and to avoid any kind of introspection about the policies the U.S. has pursued.”

Uma guerra civil esquecida: a do Sudão - Ishaan Tharoor, Sammy Westfall (The Washington Post)

 

Today's WorldView

By Ishaan Tharoor with Sammy Westfall  Email Sudan marks grim anniversary of civil war in shadow of other conflicts Sudanese refugees gather as teams from Doctors Without Borders assist the war-wounded from West Darfur, Sudan, in Adre hospital, Chad, in June. (Mohammad Ghannam/MSF/Reuters) Exactly a year ago, Sudan’s ruinous collapse began. Tensions between two powerful rival factions that had already carved out fiefdoms in the country — the Sudanese Armed Forces, headed by Lt. Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), headed by Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo — exploded into open war. Airstrikes hit civilian centers; militiamen and vigilantes set up checkpoints and looted neighborhoods. The capital, Khartoum, transformed into a sprawling battlefield. The conflict flared elsewhere in the African nation of close to 50 million people, including the already war-ravaged region of Darfur. For a time, Sudan’s civil war attracted some global attention. President Biden and his European counterparts whirred into action to evacuate their embassies and hundreds of foreign citizens and dual nationals based mostly in Sudan’s big cities. International journalists met convoys of refugees in the Saudi port city of Jeddah to hear their desperate, harrowing journeys to escape the country. The conflict marked a sad turn of events: A fledgling transition toward democracy in the years prior had won Sudan closer ties to a host of Western governments, and some relief from decades of U.S. sanctions. Even after Burhan and Dagalo, known universally by his sobriquet Hemedti, collaborated in interrupting that transition in 2021, ousting a civilian-led government, Sudan remained the subject of eager diplomacy. A U.S.-led initiative hoped to add Khartoum to the list of Arab capitals that could normalize relations with Israel. But the war seems to have doomed all that. The Sudanese state has essentially collapsed in many parts of the country. In some areas, hospitals and health services barely function. Thousands of civilians have been killed, including in atrocities and massacres likely to be remembered as war crimes. Courageous civil rights groups are documenting myriad accounts of sexual violence and rape. Lackluster rounds of peace talks, convened in some instances by Arab governments that tacitly back one party or the other, have yielded failed cease-fires. And as destruction and death mounts, international awareness and interest in Sudan’s misery has waned. RSF soldiers on a motorbike drive by a destroyed tank belonging to the defeated Sudanese Armed Forces, on a main street in El Geneina, the capital of West Darfur, Sudan, on February 20. (Diana Zeyneb Alhindawi for The Washington Post/for The Washington Post) Twelve months on, the humanitarian situation in Sudan is astonishingly grim. The country is the site of the world’s largest displacement crisis, with more than a fifth of its population forced out of their homes by the civil war, as well as earlier rounds of conflict. Nearly a third of the population is acutely food insecure, according to U.N. data. Some 19 million children are out of school; an estimated 3 million Sudanese children are malnourished. Humanitarian officials have been warning of hunger — and its attendant miseries, such as cholera and other diseases — gripping the country. “This is a huge, looming problem, and they are very close to famine,” Cindy McCain, executive director of the U.N.’s World Food Program, told my colleagues at the beginning of the month. “Kids are dying of starvation within Darfur and other parts of the country.” International organizations complain that it’s logistically impossible to service much of the country. “Constraints to humanitarian access are severely impeding the delivery of life-saving assistance, and humanitarian funding needs have gone largely unmet,” noted a reportby the International Rescue Committee. By February, food prices in Sudan had spiked by more than 110 percent since the war began. In ramshackle refugee camps in neighboring Chad and South Sudan, aid groups say a dearth of funding may see food distribution cease imminently. The World Food Program says the “roots of the hunger problem are twofold: access and funding,” explained my colleagues Diana Zeyneb Alhindawi and Katharine Houreld. “Within Sudan, WFP trucks have been blocked, hijacked, attacked, looted and detained. Outside Sudan, makeshift camps are swollen with hungry and sick arrivals — but there’s no money to feed them.” On Monday, international governments, humanitarians and donors will convene in Paris for a conference aimed at raising funds for Sudan. They meet at a time when a paltry 5 percent of the humanitarian requests put out for Sudan by U.N. agencies have been met. There’s no question that the wars in Ukraine and Gaza — exacerbated furthermore by the recent escalation between Israel and Iran — have put Sudan’s tragedy in the shade. “As communities barrel toward famine, as cholera and measles spread, as violence continues to claim countless lives, the world has largely remained silent,” said U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, last week. That must change now, she added. “The international community must give more. It must do more, and it has to care more.” “For one year, the people of Sudan have been neglected and ignored as they bore the brunt of violent clashes” between the warring parties, said Tigere Chagutah, Amnesty International’s regional director for East and Southern Africa, in a statement. “Diplomatic efforts have so far failed to end violations, protect civilians, provide sufficient humanitarian aid, or hold the perpetrators of war crimes to account.” Women prepare a meager meal on Feb. 18 in the yard of a former primary school, one of the numerous sites where thousands displaced by the war are seeking shelter in Sirba, a town north of El Geneina. (Diana Zeyneb Alhindawi for The Washington Post/for The Washington Post) Yet the warring parties are as likely to sharpen their hatchets as they are to bury them. The country is roughly split now between west and east, with the RSF ascendant in the former and Burhan and his allies better entrenched in the latter. In its Sudan briefing, the International Crisis Group, a think tank, urged countries such as the United States, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates to use more of their leverage to bring the feuding factions to heel, open up access for humanitarian relief and place Sudan back on a path to stability. “The alternative is grim to contemplate, as the country teeters on the brink of chaos, mass starvation and a war that could spread across its borders to a troubled region,” noted the Crisis Group. “Time is of the essence – particularly since the parties are inveigling new warlords to join the fight with promises that they will share in victory’s eventual spoils, which promises to make negotiations to end the war that much more difficult.”