| Wait, isn't it supposed to be the other way around? |
TRIPOLI - Libya's upheaval the past two years helped lead to the ongoing conflict in Mali, and now Mali's war threatens to wash back and further hike Libya's instability.
Fears are growing that post-Muammar Gaddafi Libya is becoming an incubator of turmoil, with an overflow of weapons and militants operating freely, ready for battlefields at home or abroad.
The possibility of a Mali backlash was underlined the past week when several European governments evacuated their citizens from Libya's second largest city, Benghazi, fearing attacks in retaliation for the French-led military assault against Al Qaeda-linked extremists in northern Mali.
| All the while the Benghazi city fathers were telling them to stay... |
More worrisome is the possibility that militants inspired by -- or linked to -- Al Qaeda can establish a strong enough foothold in Libya to spread instability across a swath of North Africa where long, porous desert borders have little meaning, governments are weak, and tribal and ethnic networks stretch from country to country.
Already, Libya's turmoil echoes around the region and in the Middle East. The large numbers of weapons brought into Libya or seized from government caches during the 2011 civil war against Gaddafi are now smuggled freely to Mali, Egypt and its Sinai Peninsula, the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip and to rebels fighting Syrian President Bashar Assad.
Militants in Libya are believed to have operational links with fellow militant groups in the same swath, Libyan fighters have joined rebels in Syria and are believed to operate in other countries as well. Libyan officials, activists and experts are increasingly raising alarm over how militants have taken advantage of the oil-rich country's weakness to grow in strength. During his more than four-decade rule Gaddafi stripped the country of national institutions, and after his fall the central government has little authority beyond the capital, Tripoli. Militias established to fight Gaddafi remain dominant, and tribes and regions are sharply divided.
| It's a tribal country. Gaddafi used brutality and fear to keep everyone in line -- that was the only 'national institution' that mattered. Now that's gone and tribalism has re-established its traditional authority; which is to say, not very much. |
In the eastern city of Benghazi, birthplace of the revolt that led to the ouster and killing of Gaddafi, militias espousing an Al Qaeda ideology and including veteran fighters are prevalent, even ostensibly serving as security forces on behalf of the government since the police and military are so weak and poorly armed.
| Recall too that Benghazi and the east have traditionally been a separately administered region, Cyrenaica, as opposed to the western Tripolitania. There's not much history to suggest that the two halves can work together. |
One such militia, Ansar Al Shariah, is believed to have been behind the Sept. 11 attack on the US Consulate in the city that killed four Americans, including the ambassador. Since then, militants have been blamed for a wave of assassinations of security officers and government officials.
Earlier this month, former Libyan leader Mustafa Abdul Jalil warned the militant threat extends to efforts to establish a state that can enforce rule of law.
"Libya will not see stability except by facing them," he told a gathering aired on Libyan TV. "It is time to either hold dialogue or confront them." He listed 30 officials and police officers assassinated in Benghazi the past year.
The Mali drama illustrates how the threat bounces back and forth across the borders drawn in the Sahel, the region stretching across the Sahara Desert. Libya and Mali are separated by Algeria, but the two countries had deep ties under Gaddafi. Thousands of Tuaregs moved from Mali to Libya beginning in the 1970s, and many joined special divisions of Gaddafi's military where they earned higher salaries than they would have at home.
As Gaddafi was falling in 2011, thousands of heavily armed Tuareg fighters in southern Libya fled to northern Mali. The Tuareg are an indigenous ethnic group living throughout the Sahel, from Mali to Chad and into Libya and Algeria.
The fighters, led by commander Mohammed Ag Najem, broke the Mali government's hold over the north and declared their long-held dream of a Tuareg homeland, Azawad. But they in turn were defeated by militants, some linked to Al Qaeda's branch in North Africa, who took over the territory and imposed rule under an extreme version of Shariah.
| Not a surprise, the al-Qaeda inspired thugs were more brutal and more serious about winning that fight, so they did. |
This month, as militants moved south, France launched its military intervention to rescue the Mali government.
In retaliation, militants seized an oil complex in eastern Algeria, prompting a siege by Algerian forces that killed dozens of Western hostages and militants. The militant group that carried out the Algeria hostage taking, in turn, had help from Libyan extremists in the form of smuggled weapons and "organiational ties," the group's leader, Moktar Belmoktar said.
"Their ideological and organisational connection to us is not an accusation against a Muslim but a source of pride and honour to us and to them," Belmoktar, the one-eyed Algerian founder of the Masked Brigade, said of the Libyans in an interview. |
Libya's outgoing National Transitional Council (NTC) has handed over power to the newly-elected General National Congress almost a year after the revolution that toppled long-time dictator Muammar Qadaffy.
the ephemeral Ban Ki-moon
International Criminal Court