Libya is now turning the repressive past back into the future.
Warlord Haftar Confident, pompous, slightly messianic
The warlord
Benghazi was the center of the revolution against Gaddafi. Now Khalifa Haftar controls his war against the government in Tripoli from here. Even his own people fear him.
August 30, 2019 (Spiegel Plus) – At the gates of Benghazi, in his headquarters, sits the ruler of the city and does not want to talk. General Khalifa Haftar does not explain anything – not his war against the government in Tripoli, the capital of Libya, not himself.
At the end of July, he appears briefly on Libyan television – a tall man, 75 years old, with a mustache, fleshy cheeks and white hair. Confident, pompous and slightly messianic, he appeals to the morale of his troops.
Haftar stages himself as a strong man who brings security, who conquers Tripoli. In Benghazi, the great city of the East, one can observe what could happen if Haftar actually won and ruled over the whole of Libya.
Haftar is everywhere in Benghazi and nowhere. He looks from posters to the city. He haunts people’s minds. Nobody wants to say something bad about him openly. And only a few something good. In Tripoli, people rant about an incompetent government, but, they say, they could at least do that aloud. That’s not the case in Benghazi under Haftar.
For almost a century, Benghazi was the engine of change in Libya. Here the resistance against the Italian colonial rulers was concentrated. It was here that Idris proclaimed the Kingdom of Libya in 1951. Here the rebellion against dictator Muammar al-Gaddafi began in 2011. Now the city has submitted to Haftar.
Ali Marhab, a short, stocky man with short hair and broad face, walks into Tahrir Square in Benghazi, where the revolt against Gaddafi began. Like the other protagonists in this text, he does not want his real name to be mentioned. He fears repression. “There are ears everywhere,” he says.
Marhab fought Gaddafi in 2011. He helped Haftar expel the Islamists from Benghazi from 2014 to 2017. He now works for Haftar’s Libyan National Army (LNA). In which position should not be said here.
Marhab passes the courthouse. Grenades have blown out parts of the facade. In the parking lot are faded palm trunks. The house fronts are riddled with bullets and grenades. “If you have an opinion, keep it for yourself – if you say something, people might ask questions,” he complains.
Haftar has established a surveillance state in Benghazi. Anyone who tries to move alone as a foreign journalist will not get 200 meters far. Journalists are rarely allowed into the city at all. Security guards in civilian clothes inspect you everywhere. There are also men sitting in the hotel watching the guests.
In the city that was once the mouthpiece of the revolution, where countless newspapers were published after Gaddafi’s downfall, radio stations broadcast where activists raised their voices, fear reigns supreme. Benghazi looks frozen. The inhabitants speak of the “great depression” behind closed doors.
Since Haftar himself hardly talks about his plans, the world still puzzles what he intends to do with Libya. He never declared his support for democracy. The time for that in Libya is not yet ripe, he once said. There is some evidence that the general would like to transfer the Benghazi model to the whole country, that he wants to build a similar surveillance state as Gaddafi, his old companion, once did.
Like Gaddafi, Haftar attended the Royal Military Academy in Benghazi. Together they staged against King Idris. Haftar was one of Gaddafi’s most important generals until he was arrested in 1987 in a failed campaign in Chad, fell into disfavor with Gaddafi, and later fled into exile in the US, where he allegedly collaborated with the CIA.
Mohamed Al Reid, a Libyan ex-officer, who has known Haftar for a long time, tells us that Haftar decided after the Chad mission not to return to Libya as a loser but as the winner. “He was disreputable among us officers as ruthless. He was not interested in the individual person or the individual fate.”
Haftar lived for nearly two decades in Falls Church, Virginia. When the Libyans rose up against Gaddafi, he packed his bags, flew to Cairo and drove from there to Libya. Haftar claimed leadership of the revolution. And failed, whereupon he temporarily returned to the USA. From 2012, al Qaeda offshoot Ansar al-Sharia spread to the region around Benghazi, sending fighters to war against the French in Mali and Syria. More and more attacks took place. When the international community withdrew from Benghazi after the murder of US Ambassador Christopher Stevens in September 2012, the jihadists finally took control of large parts of the city.
It was a state of lawlessness Haftar used for himself. Dressed in military uniform, in 2014 he called on the Libyans on television to rebel against the militia government in Tripoli. The people initially refused to follow him. How is that supposed to work, a coup without an army, many asked themselves. Haftar, however, began to forge alliances with the tribes in the east of the country. In a three-year bloody house war, he succeeded in driving the Islamists out of Benghazi in 2017.
Libya is divided in two: In the west, in Tripoli, the UN installed Fayez Sarraj, a former architect, as head of government in March 2016. In reality, however, the region is dominated by various militias. In the east, around Benghazi, General Haftar is in charge. In 2018, his LNA conquered the south of the country to advance to Tripoli in the spring.
Haftar has promised his followers a blitzkrieg against the militias of Tripoli. Meanwhile, the battles cost more than 1,000 lives, and more than 100,000 had to flee. The conflict is developing into a proxy war: Turkey and Qatar are supporting Sarraj, and Ankara is providing drones, among other things. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt are behind Haftar. France, too, has now more or less openly taken the side of the warlord. And yet the fronts hardly move.
Marhab was born in Benghazi; he has always lived here, except when working on an oil platform. He saw his house burn. Now he wants to help rebuild the old town. This afternoon he controls street lamps. The government, he criticizes, do nothing. Except to go to war.
Marhab looks tired. “I would never go to the west, to Tripoli, and fight,” he says. “I have no energy left for another war; I still see pictures of severed limbs, fallen friends.”
The civil war has divided the people of Libya. Nowhere else is this more evident than in Benghazi. For many in the West, especially in the militia stronghold of Misurata, victory against Haftar is the most important goal. During the fighting for Benghazi, the militias from Misurata sent ships to supply the Islamists. The hatred of the people in Benghazi for the west of the country is particularly great.
Ruined center of Benghazi: The wounds do not heal
Benghazi was once a cosmopolitan city where all the tribes of the country met, where people married across tribes and ethnic groups. The immigrants from Misurata have been an integral part of this society for centuries. That has changed.
Families whose original roots are not in the East were branded as Ghuraba, as people from the West, especially citizens with roots in Misurata got problems. Even if their ancestors came to Benghazi centuries ago, they were blamed for the terror in the city. There are voices in Benghazi that speak of “ethnic cleansing”.
In early August, unknown persons made an attack on a UN convoy in the Hawari district. It was the second car bombing in a month. Five people died, including three UN employees. The incident is a setback for Haftar, who has promised to provide security with a tough hand.
The wounds won’t heal in Benghazi. The debris field of the old town is a warning to the rest of the country. Haftar, it seems, does not want to reconcile; he wants to win.
“It’s starting again,” says Marhab. “People are disappearing again.”
Just like the MP Seham Sergewa a few weeks ago. Already during the war against the Islamists in Benghazi, she had asked uncomfortable questions. Did the inner city really have to be bombed to this extent? Are all the families who came from Misurata generations ago really sympathizers of Ansar al-Sharia and the “Islamic State”?
Now that she was criticizing Haftar’s offensive on Tripoli and demanding UN investigations into the kidnapping of Haftar critics, she disappeared. There are photos to prove that the vehicles that appeared in front of the Sergewa’s house belonged to the LNA. The masked took Sergewa with them her husband was shot in both legs and her son was beaten up. They had to go to hospital. “The army is the red line” someone sprayed on the wall next to the front door.
A man in a brown shirt with a receding hairline and a clean-cut beard sits at a table on the terrace of Hotel Juliana, west of Tabalino, a formerly affluent neighborhood full of Cubist mansions and shady avenues. The man runs an NGO in Benghazi. But whenever he can, he flees to his farm in the mountains.
“It’s horrible here,” he says, “leaden heaviness lies over the city.” The revolutionaries and all those who came after them were no different in their thinking than Gaddafi. The maxim applies: If you are not for us, you are against us.
The head of the NGO looks around at the terrace. Families and business people meet here. In between, security forces in civilian clothes. “I saw some of these faces before the revolution,” he says. At a table, someone pulls out a cell phone and films it openly.
“I think all this is not just Haftar’s fault,” he says, keeping in mind that his voice is quieter than the music on the patio. “It’s the mentality, it’s a lot of little Gaddafis, it’s anticipatory obedience, people are falling back into the patterns they know, the Gaddafi surveillance and control patterns.”
Before the revolution, he says, it was possible to earn a quick 500 dinars by denouncing alleged spies in police stations. Today, Facebook is being used for reputation killings. “If you want to have a house or a business, all you have to do is spread the rumor that the owner sympathizes with Ansar al-Sharia or the people of Misurata, and a militia comes by to share the profits.”
A few days later, in the early evening, Ali Marhab stands in the place of the tree that was once famous for the cedar that adorned it. The streets are empty, only one merchant has set up his stand. A few sacks of charcoal are lying there next to a block in which he has beaten a butcher’s knife. A poster shows Haftar’s portrait. “Go ahead, Field Marshal Haftar, God and the people are behind you,” stands next to it. A few young people help Marhab to renew the markings on the sidewalk.
A dusty road leads from the tree’s square towards Corniche, the coastal mile where teenagers race on roaring quads, merchants sell popcorn, where rusty merry-go-rounds spin, children jump on bouncy castles where it smells like grilled corn and men walk around in Mickey Mouse and Goofy costumes.
On the other side of the Corniche lie the ruins of the old town, separated from the hustle and bustle only by the wide street.
The Corniche looks like a miniature of Haftar’s realm: a big show intended to cover up the brutal, repressive reality – and yet it cannot.
Several people are taking Haftar’s show off. They long for stability and peace. For that, they accept the return to autocracy and bondage. The alternatives in their eyes would be militia rule, Islamist terror, and war.
It seems that eight years of war in Libya have shaken Benghazi so badly that the city, with its eyes open, is now turning the repressive past back into the future.
By Mirco Keilberth and Fritz Schaap
Description of source: Der Spiegel covering general news and politics, and focusing on economic topics. Country of origin: Germany
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